To the Lighthouse

Woolf, Virginia

Published: 1927
Categorie(s): Fiction
Source: http://gutenberg.net.au

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About Woolf:
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was an English
novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary
figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was
a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dal-
loway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the
book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum,
"a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction".

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 Part 1
The Window

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Chapter 1
"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll have
to be up with the lark," she added.
To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were
settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to
which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a
night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even
at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separ-
ate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows,
cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest
childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise
and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James
Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated cata-
logue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerat-
or, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The
wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whiten-
ing before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling—all
these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had
already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the im-
age of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and
his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the
sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scis-
sors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on
the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis
of public affairs.
"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window,
"it won't be fine."
Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would
have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then,
James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr
Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing,
as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically,
not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule

4
upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he
was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accur-
acy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was in-
capable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagree-
able word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least
of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware
from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the pas-
sage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our
frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr Ramsay would straighten his
back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs,
above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.
"But it may be fine—I expect it will be fine," said Mrs Ramsay, making
some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting, impa-
tiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all,
it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was
threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines,
and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not
really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows,
who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish
the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden,
something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a
whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a
rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or
newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your
wife, not to know how your children were,—if they were ill, if they had
fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves
breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the
windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and
the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors
for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked,
addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather
differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.
"It's due west," said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers
spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr
Ramsay's evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is
to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the
Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs Ramsay admitted; it
was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappoin-
ted; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. "The
atheist," they called him; "the little atheist." Rose mocked him; Prue

5
mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger
without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the
hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the
Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.
"Nonsense," said Mrs Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the
habit of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication
(which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to
lodge some in the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to
young men in particular, who were poor as churchmice, "exceptionally
able," her husband said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday.
Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reas-
ons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that
they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an at-
titude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find
agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old wo-
man could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe
betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!—who did
not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her
bones!
She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she
said. He had been asked.
They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way,
some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and
saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she
might have managed things better—her husband; money; his books. But
for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision,
evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold,
and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had
spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue,
Nancy, Rose—could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for
themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life;
not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their
minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of Eng-
land and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them
all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out
the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table
beneath their mother's eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme
courtesy, like a queen's raising from the mud to wash a beggar's dirty
foot, when she admonished them so very severely about that wretched

6
atheist who had chased them—or, speaking accurately, been invited to
stay with them—in the Isle of Skye.
"There'll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow," said Charles
Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her
husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave
her and James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a
miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He
couldn't play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute,
Andrew said. They knew what he liked best—to be for ever walking up
and down, up and down, with Mr Ramsay, and saying who had won
this, who had won that, who was a "first rate man" at Latin verses, who
was "brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound," who was un-
doubtedly the "ablest fellow in Balliol," who had buried his light tempor-
arily at Bristol or Bedford, but was bound to be heard of later when his
Prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley had the first pages in proof with him
if Mr Ramsay would like to see them, to some branch of mathematics or
philosophy saw the light of day. That was what they talked about.
She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other
day, something about "waves mountains high." Yes, said Charles Tans-
ley, it was a little rough. "Aren't you drenched to the skin?" she had said.
"Damp, not wet through," said Mr Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling
his socks.
But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face;
it was not his manners. It was him—his point of view. When they talked
about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said
it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they com-
plained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole
thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage
them—he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries they
said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose,
one did not.
Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the
meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay
sought their bedrooms, their fastness in a house where there was no oth-
er privacy to debate anything, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of
the Reform Bill; sea birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured
into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that
every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her
father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats,
flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small

7
birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the
wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with
sand from bathing.
Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very
fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs Ramsay deplored.
They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went
from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go
with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences,
when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The
real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window,
are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and
poor, high and low; the great in birth receiving from her, half grudging,
some respect, for had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if
slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about
English drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charm-
ingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her
temper came from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold
Scotch; but more profoundly, she ruminated the other problem, of rich
and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here
or in London, when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in
person with a bag on her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which
she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and
spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she
would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her
own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become what
with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidat-
ing the social problem.
Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, hold-
ing James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that
young man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with
something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew
without looking round. They had all gone—the children; Minta Doyle
and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband—they had all gone.
So she turned with a sigh and said, "Would it bore you to come with me,
Mr Tansley?"
She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she
would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her
basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out
a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however,
she must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask

8
Mr Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat's eyes ajar, so that
like a cat's they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds
passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatso-
ever, if he wanted anything.
For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They
were going to the town. "Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco?" she sugges-
ted, stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped
themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would
have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but
a little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somno-
lence which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and be-
nevolent lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the
people in it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of
something, which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of
canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk white.
No, nothing, he murmured.
He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs Ramsay, as they
went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortu-
nate marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an
indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet some one
round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl;
an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry
"very beautifully, I believe," being willing to teach the boys Persian or
Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that?—and then lying, as
they saw him, on the lawn.
It flattered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs Ram-
say should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she
did the greatness of man's intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all
wives—not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy
enough, she believed—to their husband's labours, she made him feel bet-
ter pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked,
had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little
bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried THAT
herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things,
something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons
which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and
hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt
capable of anything and saw himself—but what was she looking at? At a
man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each
shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and

9
blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the ad-
vertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals,
lions, tigers… Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read it
out… "will visit this town," she read. It was terribly dangerous work for
a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like
that—his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.
"Let us all go!" she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses
had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.
"Let's go," he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however,
with a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let us all go to the cir-
cus." No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why
not? she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him
warmly, at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses
when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very
thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did
not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his
father was a working man. "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ramsay. He
keeps a shop." He himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen.
Often he went without a greatcoat in winter. He could never "return hos-
pitality" (those were his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make
things last twice the time other people did; he smoked the cheapest to-
bacco; shag; the same the old men did in the quays. He worked
hard—seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence of
something upon somebody—they were walking on and Mrs Ramsay did
not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there… disserta-
tion… fellowship… readership… lectureship. She could not follow the
ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself
that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch,
poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his
father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that
they didn't laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he
would have liked, she supposed, would have been to say how he had
gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with the Ramsays. He was an awful
prig—oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the
town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the
cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and
working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered
that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the cir-
cus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell
her—but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on

10
the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could
not help exclaiming, "Oh, how beautiful!" For the great plateful of blue
water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the
midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in
soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on
them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon coun-
try, uninhabited of men.
That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her
husband loved.
She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There
indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yel-
low boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by
ten little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face
gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his
brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr Paunceforte had
been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said,
green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on
the beach.
But her grandmother's friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they
passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colours, and
then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths to keep them
moist.
So Mr Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that man's picture
was skimpy, was that what one said? The colours weren't solid? Was
that what one said? Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion
which had been growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he
had wanted to take her bag, had increased in the town when he had
wanted to tell her everything about himself, he was coming to see him-
self, and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was aw-
fully strange.
There he stood in the parlour of the poky little house where she had
taken him, waiting for her, while she went upstairs a moment to see a
woman. He heard her quick step above; heard her voice cheerful, then
low; looked at the mats, tea-caddies, glass shades; waited quite impa-
tiently; looked forward eagerly to the walk home; determined to carry
her bag; then heard her come out; shut a door; say they must keep the
windows open and the doors shut, ask at the house for anything they
wanted (she must be talking to a child) when, suddenly, in she came,
stood for a moment silent (as if she had been pretending up there, and
for a moment let herself be now), stood quite motionless for a moment

11
against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter;
when all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the
most beautiful person he had ever seen.
With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild vi-
olets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had
eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her
breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in
her eyes and the wind in her hair—He had hold of her bag.
"Good-bye, Elsie," she said, and they walked up the street, she holding
her parasol erect and walking as if she expected to meet some one round
the corner, while for the first time in his life Charles Tansley felt an ex-
traordinary pride; a man digging in a drain stopped digging and looked
at her, let his arm fall down and looked at her; for the first time in his life
Charles Tansley felt an extraordinary pride; felt the wind and the cycla-
men and the violets for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had
hold of her bag.

12
Chapter 2
"No going to the Lighthouse, James," he said, as trying in deference to
Mrs Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.
Odious little man, thought Mrs Ramsay, why go on saying that?

13
Chapter 3
"Perhaps you will wake up and find the sun shining and the birds
singing," she said compassionately, smoothing the little boy's hair, for
her husband, with his caustic saying that it would not be fine, had
dashed his spirits she could see. This going to the Lighthouse was a pas-
sion of his, she saw, and then, as if her husband had not said enough,
with his caustic saying that it would not be fine tomorrow, this odious
little man went and rubbed it in all over again.
"Perhaps it will be fine tomorrow," she said, smoothing his hair.
All she could do now was to admire the refrigerator, and turn the
pages of the Stores list in the hope that she might come upon something
like a rake, or a mowing-machine, which, with its prongs and its handles,
would need the greatest skill and care in cutting out. All these young
men parodied her husband, she reflected; he said it would rain; they said
it would be a positive tornado.
But here, as she turned the page, suddenly her search for the picture of
a rake or a mowing-machine was interrupted. The gruff murmur, irregu-
larly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which
had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as
she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were
happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had
taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her,
such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then,
"How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so
that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most
part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed
consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the
words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding
you—I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly,
especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in
hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums re-
morselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of
the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had

14
slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephermal as
a rainbow—this sound which had been obscured and concealed under
the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her
look up with an impulse of terror.
They had ceased to talk; that was the explanation. Falling in one
second from the tension which had gripped her to the other extreme
which, as if to recoup her for her unnecessary expense of emotion, was
cool, amused, and even faintly malicious, she concluded that poor
Charles Tansley had been shed. That was of little account to her. If her
husband required sacrifices (and indeed he did) she cheerfully offered
up to him Charles Tansley, who had snubbed her little boy.
One moment more, with her head raised, she listened, as if she waited
for some habitual sound, some regular mechanical sound; and then,
hearing something rhythmical, half said, half chanted, beginning in the
garden, as her husband beat up and down the terrace, something
between a croak and a song, she was soothed once more, assured again
that all was well, and looking down at the book on her knee found the
picture of a pocket knife with six blades which could only be cut out if
James was very careful.
Suddenly a loud cry, as of a sleep-walker, half roused, something
about
Stormed at with shot and shell
sung out with the utmost intensity in her ear, made her turn appre-
hensively to see if anyone had heard him. Only Lily Briscoe, she was
glad to find; and that did not matter. But the sight of the girl standing on
the edge of the lawn painting reminded her; she was supposed to be
keeping her head as much in the same position as possible for Lily's pic-
ture. Lily's picture! Mrs Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and
her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her
painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs
Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her head.

15
Chapter 4
Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with
his hands waving shouting out, "Boldly we rode and well," but, merci-
fully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die gloriously she supposed upon
the heights of Balaclava. Never was anybody at once so ridiculous and so
alarming. But so long as he kept like that, waving, shouting, she was
safe; he would not stand still and look at her picture. And that was what
Lily Briscoe could not have endured. Even while she looked at the mass,
at the line, at the colour, at Mrs Ramsay sitting in the window with
James, she kept a feeler on her surroundings lest some one should creep
up, and suddenly she should find her picture looked at. But now, with
all her senses quickened as they were, looking, straining, till the colour of
the wall and the jacmanna beyond burnt into her eyes, she was aware of
someone coming out of the house, coming towards her; but somehow di-
vined, from the footfall, William Bankes, so that though her brush
quivered, she did not, as she would have done had it been Mr Tansley,
Paul Rayley, Minta Doyle, or practically anybody else, turn her canvas
upon the grass, but let it stand. William Bankes stood beside her.
They had rooms in the village, and so, walking in, walking out, part-
ing late on door-mats, had said little things about the soup, about the
children, about one thing and another which made them allies; so that
when he stood beside her now in his judicial way (he was old enough to
be her father too, a botanist, a widower, smelling of soap, very scrupu-
lous and clean) she just stood there. He just stood there. Her shoes were
excellent, he observed. They allowed the toes their natural expansion.
Lodging in the same house with her, he had noticed too, how orderly she
was, up before breakfast and off to paint, he believed, alone: poor, pre-
sumably, and without the complexion or the allurement of Miss Doyle
certainly, but with a good sense which made her in his eyes superior to
that young lady. Now, for instance, when Ramsay bore down on them,
shouting, gesticulating, Miss Briscoe, he felt certain, understood.
Some one had blundered.

16
 Mr Ramsay glared at them. He glared at them without seeming to see
them. That did make them both vaguely uncomfortable. Together they
had seen a thing they had not been meant to see. They had encroached
upon a privacy. So, Lily thought, it was probably an excuse of his for
moving, for getting out of earshot, that made Mr Bankes almost immedi-
ately say something about its being chilly and suggested taking a stroll.
She would come, yes. But it was with difficulty that she took her eyes off
her picture.
The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not
have considered it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring
white, since she saw them like that, fashionable though it was, since Mr
Paunceforte's visit, to see everything pale, elegant, semitransparent.
Then beneath the colour there was the shape. She could see it all so
clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her
brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's
flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her
who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from
conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.
Such she often felt herself—struggling against terrific odds to maintain
her courage; to say: "But this is what I see; this is what I see," and so to
clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thou-
sand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that
chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves
upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping
house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to con-
trol her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted
so far) at Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her—but what could one say to
her? "I'm in love with you?" No, that was not true. "I'm in love with this
all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was
absurd, it was impossible. So now she laid her brushes neatly in the box,
side by side, and said to William Bankes:
"It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat," she said, look-
ing about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green,
the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks
dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed,
turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of
September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the
garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas
grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like

17
brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay
looked bluer than ever.
They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was
as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stag-
nant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical re-
lief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart ex-
panded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked
and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up be-
hind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so
that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain
of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the
pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again
smoothly, a film of mother of pearl.
They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity,
excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sail-
ing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let
its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the pic-
ture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far
away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sad-
ness—because the thing was completed partly, and partly because dis-
tant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and
to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at
rest.
Looking at the far sand hills, William Bankes thought of Ramsay:
thought of a road in Westmorland, thought of Ramsay striding along a
road by himself hung round with that solitude which seemed to be his
natural air. But this was suddenly interrupted, William Bankes re-
membered (and this must refer to some actual incident), by a hen, strad-
dling her wings out in protection of a covey of little chicks, upon which
Ramsay, stopping, pointed his stick and said "Pretty—pretty," an odd il-
lumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought it, which showed his sim-
plicity, his sympathy with humble things; but it seemed to him as if their
friendship had ceased, there, on that stretch of road. After that, Ramsay
had married. After that, what with one thing and another, the pulp had
gone out of their friendship. Whose fault it was he could not say, only,
after a time, repetition had taken the place of newness. It was to repeat
that they met. But in this dumb colloquy with the sand dunes he main-
tained that his affection for Ramsay had in no way diminished; but there,
like the body of a young man laid up in peat for a century, with the red

18
fresh on his lips, was his friendship, in its acuteness and reality, laid up
across the bay among the sandhills.
He was anxious for the sake of this friendship and perhaps too in or-
der to clear himself in his own mind from the imputation of having dried
and shrunk—for Ramsay lived in a welter of children, whereas Bankes
was childless and a widower—he was anxious that Lily Briscoe should
not disparage Ramsay (a great man in his own way) yet should under-
stand how things stood between them. Begun long years ago, their
friendship had petered out on a Westmorland road, where the hen
spread her wings before her chicks; after which Ramsay had married,
and their paths lying different ways, there had been, certainly for no
one's fault, some tendency, when they met, to repeat.
Yes. That was it. He finished. He turned from the view. And, turning
to walk back the other way, up the drive, Mr Bankes was alive to things
which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to
him the body of his friendship lying with the red on its lips laid up in
peat—for instance, Cam, the little girl, Ramsay's youngest daughter. She
was picking Sweet Alice on the bank. She was wild and fierce. She
would not "give a flower to the gentleman" as the nursemaid told her.
No! no! no! she would not! She clenched her fist. She stamped. And Mr
Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her
about his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.
The Ramsays were not rich, and it was a wonder how they managed to
contrive it all. Eight children! To feed eight children on philosophy! Here
was another of them, Jasper this time, strolling past, to have a shot at a
bird, he said, nonchalantly, swinging Lily's hand like a pump-handle as
he passed, which caused Mr Bankes to say, bitterly, how SHE was a fa-
vourite. There was education now to be considered (true, Mrs Ramsay
had something of her own perhaps) let alone the daily wear and tear of
shoes and stockings which those "great fellows," all well grown, angular,
ruthless youngsters, must require. As for being sure which was which, or
in what order they came, that was beyond him. He called them privately
after the Kings and Queens of England; Cam the Wicked, James the
Ruthless, Andrew the Just, Prue the Fair—for Prue would have beauty,
he thought, how could she help it?—and Andrew brains. While he
walked up the drive and Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his
comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world) he
weighed Ramsay's case, commiserated him, envied him, as if he had seen
him divest himself of all those glories of isolation and austerity which
crowned him in youth to cumber himself definitely with fluttering wings

19
and clucking domesticities. They gave him something—William Bankes
acknowledged that; it would have been pleasant if Cam had stuck a
flower in his coat or clambered over his shoulder, as over her father's, to
look at a picture of Vesuviusin eruption; but they had also, his old
friends could not but feel, destroyed something. What would a stranger
think now? What did this Lily Briscoe think? Could one help noticing
that habits grew on him? eccentricities, weaknesses perhaps? It was as-
tonishing that a man of his intellect could stoop so low as he did—but
that was too harsh a phrase—could depend so much as he did upon
people's praise.
"Oh, but," said Lily, "think of his work!"
Whenever she "thought of his work" she always saw clearly before her
a large kitchen table. It was Andrew's doing. She asked him what his
father's books were about. "Subject and object and the nature of reality,"
Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what
that meant. "Think of a kitchen table then," he told her, "when you're not
there."
So now she always saw, when she thought of Mr Ramsay's work, a
scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they
had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she
focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its
fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those
scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have
been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four
legs in air. Naturally, if one's days were passed in this seeing of angular
essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds
and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark
of the finest minds to do so), naturally one could not be judged like an
ordinary person.
Mr Bankes liked her for bidding him "think of his work." He had
thought of it, often and often. Times without number, he had said,
"Ramsay is one of those men who do their best work before they are
forty." He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little
book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or
less amplification, repetition. But the number of men who make a defin-
ite contribution to anything whatsoever is very small, he said, pausing
by the pear tree, well brushed, scrupulously exact, exquisitely judicial.
Suddenly, as if the movement of his hand had released it, the load of her
accumulated impressions of him tilted up, and down poured in a pon-
derous avalanche all she felt about him. That was one sensation. Then up

20
rose in a fume the essence of his being. That was another. She felt herself
transfixed by the intensity of her perception; it was his severity; his
goodness. I respect you (she addressed silently him in person) in every
atom; you are not vain; you are entirely impersonal; you are finer than
Mr Ramsay; you are the finest human being that I know; you have
neither wife nor child (without any sexual feeling, she longed to cherish
that loneliness), you live for science (involuntarily, sections of potatoes
rose before her eyes); praise would be an insult to you; generous, pure-
hearted, heroic man! But simultaneously, she remembered how he had
brought a valet all the way up here; objected to dogs on chairs; would
prose for hours (until Mr Ramsay slammed out of the room) about salt in
vegetables and the iniquity of English cooks.
How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of
them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking
one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after
all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions
poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like
following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's
pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting un-
deniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and
humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for etern-
ity. You have greatness, she continued, but Mr Ramsay has none of it. He
is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant; he wears Mrs
Ramsay to death; but he has what you (she addressed Mr Bankes) have
not; a fiery unworldliness; he knows nothing about trifles; he loves dogs
and his children. He has eight. Mr Bankes has none. Did he not come
down in two coats the other night and let Mrs Ramsay trim his hair into
a pudding basin? All of this danced up and down, like a company of
gnats, each separate but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic
net—danced up and down in Lily's mind, in and about the branches of
the pear tree, where still hung in effigy the scrubbed kitchen table, sym-
bol of her profound respect for Mr Ramsay's mind, until her thought
which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she
felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from
its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings.
"Jasper!" said Mr Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, over
the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky they
stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay, who
boomed tragically at them, "Some one had blundered!"

21
 His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs
for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising
his hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony of
peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for a
moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his
own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of dis-
covery was not to be routed utterly, but was determined to hold fast to
something of this delicious emotion, this impure rhapsody of which he
was ashamed, but in which he revelled—he turned abruptly, slammed
his private door on them; and, Lily Briscoe and Mr Bankes, looking un-
easily up into the sky, observed that the flock of starlings which Jasper
had routed with his gun had settled on the tops of the elm trees.

22
Chapter 5
"And even if it isn't fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay, raising her eyes to
glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, "it will be an-
other day. And now," she said, thinking that Lily's charm was her
Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a
clever man to see it, "and now stand up, and let me measure your leg,"
for they might go to the Lighthouse after all, and she must see if the
stocking did not need to be an inch or two longer in the leg.
Smiling, for it was an admirable idea, that had flashed upon her this
very second—William and Lily should marry—she took the heather-
mixture stocking, with its criss-cross of steel needles at the mouth of it,
and measured it against James's leg.
"My dear, stand still," she said, for in his jealousy, not liking to serve as
measuring block for the Lighthouse keeper's little boy, James fidgeted
purposely; and if he did that, how could she see, was it too long, was it
too short? she asked.
She looked up—what demon possessed him, her youngest, her cher-
ished?—and saw the room, saw the chairs, thought them fearfully
shabby. Their entrails, as Andrew said the other day, were all over the
floor; but then what was the point, she asked, of buying good chairs to
let them spoil up here all through the winter when the house, with only
one old woman to see to it, positively dripped with wet? Never mind,
the rent was precisely twopence half-penny; the children loved it; it did
her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three
hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples; and
there was room for visitors. Mats, camp beds, crazy ghosts of chairs and
tables whose London life of service was done—they did well enough
here; and a photograph or two, and books. Books, she thought, grew of
themselves. She never had time to read them. Alas! even the books that
had been given her and inscribed by the hand of the poet himself: "For
her whose wishes must be obeyed"… "The happier Helen of our days"…
disgraceful to say, she had never read them. And Croom on the Mind
and Bates on the Savage Customs of Polynesia ("My dear, stand still," she

23
said)—neither of those could one send to the Lighthouse. At a certain
moment, she supposed, the house would become so shabby that
something must be done. If they could be taught to wipe their feet and
not bring the beach in with them—that would be something. Crabs, she
had to allow, if Andrew really wished to dissect them, or if Jasper be-
lieved that one could make soup from seaweed, one could not prevent it;
or Rose's objects—shells, reeds, stones; for they were gifted, her children,
but all in quite different ways. And the result of it was, she sighed, tak-
ing in the whole room from floor to ceiling, as she held the stocking
against James's leg, that things got shabbier and got shabbier summer
after summer. The mat was fading; the wall-paper was flapping. You
couldn't tell any more that those were roses on it. Still, if every door in a
house is left perpetually open, and no lockmaker in the whole of Scot-
land can mend a bolt, things must spoil. What was the use of flinging a
green Cashemere shawl over the edge of a picture frame? In two weeks it
would be the colour of pea soup. But it was the doors that annoyed her;
every door was left open. She listened. The drawing-room door was
open; the hall door was open; it sounded as if the bedroom doors were
open; and certainly the window on the landing was open, for that she
had opened herself. That windows should be open, and doors
shut—simple as it was, could none of them remember it? She would go
into the maids' bedrooms at night and find them sealed like ovens, ex-
cept for Marie's, the Swiss girl, who would rather go without a bath than
without fresh air, but then at home, she had said, "the mountains are so
beautiful." She had said that last night looking out of the window with
tears in her eyes. "The mountains are so beautiful." Her father was dying
there, Mrs Ramsay knew. He was leaving them fatherless. Scolding and
demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands
that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman's) all had folded itself quietly
about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the
wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage
changes from bright steel to soft purple. She had stood there silent for
there was nothing to be said. He had cancer of the throat. At the recolec-
tion—how she had stood there, how the girl had said, "At home the
mountains are so beautiful," and there was no hope, no hope whatever,
she had a spasm of irritation, and speaking sharply, said to James:
"Stand still. Don't be tiresome," so that he knew instantly that her
severity was real, and straightened his leg and she measured it.
The stocking was too short by half an inch at least, making allowance
for the fact that Sorley's little boy would be less well grown than James.

24
 "It's too short," she said, "ever so much too short."
Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in
the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, per-
haps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, re-
ceived it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.
But was it nothing but looks, people said? What was there behind
it—her beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out, they asked,
had he died the week before they were married—some other, earlier lov-
er, of whom rumours reached one? Or was there nothing? nothing but an
incomparable beauty which she lived behind, and could do nothing to
disturb? For easily though she might have said at some moment of in-
timacy when stories of great passion, of love foiled, of ambition thwarted
came her way how she too had known or felt or been through it herself,
she never spoke. She was silent always. She knew then—she knew
without having learnt. Her simplicity fathomed what clever people falsi-
fied. Her singleness of mind made her drop plumb like a stone, alight ex-
act as a bird, gave her, naturally, this swoop and fall of the spirit upon
truth which delighted, eased, sustained—falsely perhaps.
("Nature has but little clay," said Mr Bankes once, much moved by her
voice on the telephone, though she was only telling him a fact about a
train, "like that of which she moulded you." He saw her at the end of the
line, Greek, blue-eyed, straight-nosed. How incongruous it seemed to be
telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to
have joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face. Yes, he
would catch the 10:30 at Euston.
"But she's no more aware of her beauty than a child," said Mr Bankes,
replacing the receiver and crossing the room to see what progress the
workmen were making with an hotel which they were building at the
back of his house. And he thought of Mrs Ramsay as he looked at that
stir among the unfinished walls. For always, he thought, there was
something incongruous to be worked into the harmony of her face. She
clapped a deer-stalker's hat on her head; she ran across the lawn in
galoshes to snatch a child from mischief. So that if it was her beauty
merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the
living thing (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched
them), and work it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a
woman, one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy—she did
not like admiration—or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of
form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she

25
wanted only to be like other people, insignificant. He did not know. He
did not know. He must go to his work.)
Knitting her reddish-brown hairy stocking, with her head outlined ab-
surdly by the gilt frame, the green shawl which she had tossed over the
edge of the frame, and the authenticated masterpiece by Michael Angelo,
Mrs Ramsay smoothed out what had been harsh in her manner a mo-
ment before, raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the forehead.
"Let us find another picture to cut out," she said.

26
Chapter 6
But what had happened?
Some one had blundered.
Starting from her musing she gave meaning to words which she had
held meaningless in her mind for a long stretch of time. "Some one had
blundered"—Fixing her short-sighted eyes upon her husband, who was
now bearing down upon her, she gazed steadily until his closeness re-
vealed to her (the jingle mated itself in her head) that something had
happened, some one had blundered. But she could not for the life of her
think what.
He shivered; he quivered. All his vanity, all his satisfaction in his own
splendour, riding fell as a thunderbolt, fierce as a hawk at the head of his
men through the valley of death, had been shattered, destroyed. Stormed
at by shot and shell, boldly we rode and well, flashed through the valley
of death, volleyed and thundered—straight into Lily Briscoe and William
Bankes. He quivered; he shivered.
Not for the world would she have spoken to him, realising, from the
familiar signs, his eyes averted, and some curious gathering together of
his person, as if he wrapped himself about and needed privacy into
which to regain his equilibrium, that he was outraged and anguished.
She stroked James's head; she transferred to him what she felt for her
husband, and, as she watched him chalk yellow the white dress shirt of a
gentleman in the Army and Navy Stores catalogue, thought what a de-
light it would be to her should he turn out a great artist; and why should
he not? He had a splendid forehead. Then, looking up, as her husband
passed her once more, she was relieved to find that the ruin was veiled;
domesticity triumphed; custom crooned its soothing rhythm, so that
when stopping deliberately, as his turn came round again, at the win-
dow he bent quizzically and whimsically to tickle James's bare calf with
a sprig of something, she twitted him for having dispatched "that poor
young man," Charles Tansley. Tansley had had to go in and write his
dissertation, he said.

27
 "James will have to write HIS dissertation one of these days," he added
ironically, flicking his sprig.
Hating his father, James brushed away the tickling spray with which
in a manner peculiar to him, compound of severity and humour, he
teased his youngest son's bare leg.
She was trying to get these tiresome stockings finished to send to
Sorley's little boy tomorrow, said Mrs Ramsay.
There wasn't the slightest possible chance that they could go to the
Lighthouse tomorrow, Mr Ramsay snapped out irascibly.
How did he know? she asked. The wind often changed.
The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's
minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been
shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts, made his
children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He
stamped his foot on the stone step. "Damn you," he said. But what had
she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.
Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west.
To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other
people's feelings, to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so bru-
tally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without
replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of
jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked. There
was nothing to be said.
He stood by her in silence. Very humbly, at length, he said that he
would step over and ask the Coastguards if she liked.
There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.
She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they
need not cut sandwiches—that was all. They came to her, naturally, since
she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, an-
other that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing
but a sponge sopped full of human emotions. Then he said, Damn you.
He said, It must rain. He said, It won't rain; and instantly a Heaven of se-
curity opened before her. There was nobody she reverenced more. She
was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt.
Already ashamed of that petulance, of that gesticulation of the hands
when charging at the head of his troops, Mr Ramsay rather sheepishly
prodded his son's bare legs once more, and then, as if he had her leave
for it, with a movement which oddly reminded his wife of the great sea
lion at the Zoo tumbling backwards after swallowing his fish and wal-
loping off so that the water in the tank washes from side to side, he

28
dived into the evening air which, already thinner, was taking the sub-
stance from leaves and hedges but, as if in return, restoring to roses and
pinks a lustre which they had not had by day.
"Some one had blundered," he said again, striding off, up and down
the terrace.
But how extraordinarily his note had changed! It was like the cuckoo;
"in June he gets out of tune"; as if he were trying over, tentatively seek-
ing, some phrase for a new mood, and having only this at hand, used it,
cracked though it was. But it sounded ridiculous—"Some one had
blundered"—said like that, almost as a question, without any conviction,
melodiously. Mrs Ramsay could not help smiling, and soon, sure
enough, walking up and down, he hummed it, dropped it, fell silent.
He was safe, he was restored to his privacy. He stopped to light his
pipe, looked once at his wife and son in the window, and as one raises
one's eyes from a page in an express train and sees a farm, a tree, a
cluster of cottages as an illustration, a confirmation of something on the
printed page to which one returns, fortified, and satisfied, so without his
distinguishing either his son or his wife, the sight of them fortified him
and satisfied him and consecrated his effort to arrive at a perfectly clear
understanding of the problem which now engaged the energies of his
splendid mind.
It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano,
divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six
letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in
running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had
reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of
England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn
which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far, far away, like children
picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at
their feet and somehow entirely defenceless against a doom which he
perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his
protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there
are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes,
but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only reached once by one man in a
generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least
was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demon-
strate. If Q then is Q—R—. Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or
three resonant taps on the handle of the urn, and proceeded. "Then R… "
He braced himself. He clenched himself.

29
 Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broil-
ing sea with six biscuits and a flask of water—endurance and justice,
foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intens-
ity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he
heard people saying—he was a failure—that R was beyond him. He
would never reach R. On to R, once more. R—
Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the
Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor,
whose temper, neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanim-
ity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R—
The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged.
The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed
among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious
distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady
goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat
the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish;
on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the let-
ters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid
no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat
every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile,
he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R.
Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the
snow has begun to fall and the mountain top is covered in mist, knows
that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon
him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of
his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he
would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there,
his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he
would die standing. He would never reach R.
He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it.
How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after
all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer,
without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a
generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has
toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more
left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dy-
ing hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His
fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand
years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed,

30
if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The
very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own
little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would
then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. (He
looked into the hedge, into the intricacy of the twigs.) Who then could
blame the leader of that forlorn party which after all has climbed high
enough to see the waste of the years and the perishing of the stars, if be-
fore death stiffens his limbs beyond the power of movement he does a
little consciously raise his numbed fingers to his brow, and square his
shoulders, so that when the search party comes they will find him dead
at his post, the fine figure of a soldier? Mr Ramsay squared his shoulders
and stood very upright by the urn.
Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment he dwells upon
fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over
his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition,
if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to
the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he
now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on
the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some
one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him?
Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and
halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at
first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are
clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity
of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and
finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head
before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the
world?

31
Chapter 7
But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them, for stopping
and looking down on them; he hated him for interrupting them; he hated
him for the exaltation and sublimity of his gestures; for the magnificence
of his head; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood, com-
manding them to attend to him) but most of all he hated the twang and
twitter of his father's emotion which, vibrating round them, disturbed
the perfect simplicity and good sense of his relations with his mother. By
looking fixedly at the page, he hoped to make him move on; by pointing
his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his mother's attention, which, he
knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But, no. Nothing
would make Mr Ramsay move on. There he stood, demanding
sympathy.
Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm,
braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort,
and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray,
looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were
being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat,
taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this
fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself,
like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a
failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay repeated,
never taking his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the
words back at him. "Charles Tansley… " she said. But he must have more
than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of
all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to
have his senses restored to him, his barrenness made furtile, and all the
rooms of the house made full of life—the drawing-room; behind the
drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond
them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life.
Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time,
she said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He
must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not

32
only here, but all over the world. Flashing her needles, confident, up-
right, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow; bade
him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy himself. She laughed, she
knitted. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength
flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scim-
itar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding
sympathy.
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her
needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at
James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her
laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a
dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full;
the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt
him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second
should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to sur-
round and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to
know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood
stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with
leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar
of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding
sympathy.
Filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied, he said, at
last, looking at her with humble gratitude, restored, renewed, that he
would take a turn; he would watch the children playing cricket. He
went.
Immediately, Mrs Ramsey seemed to fold herself together, one petal
closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so
that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite aban-
donment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm's fairy story, while
there throbbed through her, like a pulse in a spring which has expanded
to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful
creation.
Every throb of this pulse seemed, as he walked away, to enclose her
and her husband, and to give to each that solace which two different
notes, one high, one low, struck together, seem to give each other as they
combine. Yet as the resonance died, and she turned to the Fairy Tale
again, Mrs Ramsey felt not only exhausted in body (afterwards, not at
the time, she always felt this) but also there tinged her physical fatigue
some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin. Not that, as she
read aloud the story of the Fisherman's Wife, she knew precisely what it

33
came from; nor did she let herself put into words her dissatisfaction
when she realized, at the turn of the page when she stopped and heard
dully, ominously, a wave fall, how it came from this: she did not like,
even for a second, to feel finer than her husband; and further, could not
bear not being entirely sure, when she spoke to him, of the truth of what
she said. Universities and people wanting him, lectures and books and
their being of the highest importance—all that she did not doubt for a
moment; but it was their relation, and his coming to her like that, openly,
so that any one could see, that discomposed her; for then people said he
depended on her, when they must know that of the two he was infinitely
the more important, and what she gave the world, in comparison with
what he gave, negligable. But then again, it was the other thing too—not
being able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance, about the
greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, fifty pounds perhaps to
mend it; and then about his books, to be afraid that he might guess, what
she a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his best book (she
gathered that from William Bankes); and then to hide small daily things,
and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on them—all this dimin-
ished the entire joy, the pure joy, of the two notes sounding together, and
let the sound die on her ear now with a dismal flatness.
A shadow was on the page; she looked up. It was Augustus Carmi-
chael shuffling past, precisely now, at the very moment when it was
painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that
the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which,
loving her husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it; when
it was painful to feel herself convicted of unworthiness, and impeded in
her proper function by these lies, these exaggerations,—it was at this mo-
ment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation,
that Mr Carmichael shuffled past, in his yellow slippers, and some de-
mon in her made it necessary for her to call out, as he passed,
"Going indoors Mr Carmichael?"

34
Chapter 8
He said nothing. He took opium. The children said he had stained his
beard yellow with it. Perhaps. What was obvious to her was that the
poor man was unhappy, came to them every year as an escape; and yet
every year she felt the same thing; he did not trust her. She said, "I am
going to the town. Shall I get you stamps, paper, tobacco?" and she felt
him wince. He did not trust her. It was his wife's doing. She remembered
that iniquity of his wife's towards him, which had made her turn to steel
and adamant there, in the horrible little room in St John's Wood, when
with her own eyes she had seen that odious woman turn him out of the
house. He was unkempt; he dropped things on his coat; he had the tire-
someness of an old man with nothing in the world to do; and she turned
him out of the room. She said, in her odious way, "Now, Mrs Ramsay
and I want to have a little talk together," and Mrs Ramsay could see, as if
before her eyes, the innumerable miseries of his life. Had he money
enough to buy tobacco? Did he have to ask her for it? half a crown?
eighteenpence? Oh, she could not bear to think of the little indignities
she made him suffer. And always now (why, she could not guess, except
that it came probably from that woman somehow) he shrank from her.
He never told her anything. But what more could she have done? There
was a sunny room given up to him. The children were good to him.
Never did she show a sign of not wanting him. She went out of her way
indeed to be friendly. Do you want stamps, do you want tobacco? Here's
a book you might like and so on. And after all—after all (here insensibly
she drew herself together, physically, the sense of her own beauty be-
coming, as it did so seldom, present to her) after all, she had not gener-
ally any difficulty in making people like her; for instance, George Man-
ning; Mr Wallace; famous as they were, they would come to her of an
evening, quietly, and talk alone over her fire. She bore about with her,
she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect
into any room that she entered; and after all, veil it as she might, and
shrink from the monotony of bearing that it imposed on her, her beauty
was apparent. She had been admired. She had been loved. She had

35
entered rooms where mourners sat. Tears had flown in her presence.
Men, and women too, letting go to the multiplicity of things, had al-
lowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity. It injured her that he
should shrink. It hurt her. And yet not cleanly, not rightly. That was
what she minded, coming as it did on top of her discontent with her hus-
band; the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael shuffled past, just
nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slip-
pers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to
help, was vanity. For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so
instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, "O Mrs Ram-
say! dear Mrs Ramsay… Mrs Ramsay, of course!" and need her and send
for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and
therefore when Mr Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this
moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she
did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the
pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they
are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best. Shabby and worn
out, and not presumably (her cheeks were hollow, her hair was white)
any longer a sight that filled the eyes with joy, she had better devote her
mind to the story of the Fisherman and his Wife and so pacify that
bundle of sensitiveness (none of her children was as sensitive as he was),
her son James.
"The man's heart grew heavy," she read aloud, "and he would not go.
He said to himself, 'It is not right,' and yet he went. And when he came
to the sea the water was quite purple and dark blue, and grey and thick,
and no longer so green and yellow, but it was still quiet. And he stood
there and said—"
Mrs Ramsay could have wished that her husband had not chosen that
moment to stop. Why had he not gone as he said to watch the children
playing cricket? But he did not speak; he looked; he nodded; he ap-
proved; he went on. He slipped, seeing before him that hedge which had
over and over again rounded some pause, signified some conclusion,
seeing his wife and child, seeing again the urns with the trailing of red
geraniums which had so often decorated processes of thought, and bore,
written up among their leaves, as if they were scraps of paper on which
one scribbles notes in the rush of reading—he slipped, seeing all this,
smoothly into speculation suggested by an article in THE TIMES about
the number of Americans who visit Shakespeare's house every year. If
Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed
much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend

36
upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now than
in the time of the Pharaohs? Is the lot of the average human being,
however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure
of civilization? Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good requires the exist-
ence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The
thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he would
find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would ar-
gue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are
merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not ex-
press it. Nor is Shakespeare necessary to it. Not knowing precisely why
it was that he wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue
of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift, he picked a leaf
sharply from the hedge. All this would have to be dished up for the
young men at Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on his terrace, he
was merely foraging and picnicking (he threw away the leaf that he had
picked so peevishly) like a man who reaches from his horse to pick a
bunch of roses, or stuffs his pockets with nuts as he ambles at his ease
through the lanes and fields of a country known to him from boyhood. It
was all familiar; this turning, that stile, that cut across the fields. Hours
he would spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and
down and in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were
all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life of this
statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this
thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear; but at length the lane, the
field, the common, the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him
on to that further turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his
horse to a tree, and proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of the
lawn and looked out on the bay beneath.
It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out
thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to
stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly
to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer
and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind,
and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance,
how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand
on—that was his fate, his gift. But having thrown away, when he dis-
mounted, all gestures and fripperies, all trophies of nuts and roses, and
shrunk so that not only fame but even his own name was forgotten by
him, kept even in that desolation a vigilance which spared no phantom
and luxuriated in no vision, and it was in this guise that he inspired in

37
William Bankes (intermittently) and in Charles Tansley
(obsequiously)and in his wife now, when she looked up and saw him
standing at the edge of the lawn, profoundly, reverence, and pity, and
gratitude too, as a stake driven into the bed of a channel upon which the
gulls perch and the waves beat inspires in merry boat-loads a feeling of
gratitude for the duty it is taking upon itself of marking the channel out
there in the floods alone.
"But the father of eight children has no choice." Muttering half aloud,
so he broke off, turned, sighed, raised his eyes, sought the figure of his
wife reading stories to his little boy, filled his pipe. He turned from the
sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground
we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might
have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight com-
pared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed
to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a
world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It
was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his
children; he had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to
the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes
of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the
phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the trib-
utes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kid-
derminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed
under the phrase "talking nonsense," because, in effect, he had not done
the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a
man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I
like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William
Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should
be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in
thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and
laughable at one and the same time.
Teaching and preaching is beyond human power, Lily suspected. (She
was putting away her things.) If you are exalted you must somehow
come a cropper. Mrs Ramsay gave him what he asked too easily. Then
the change must be so upsetting, Lily said. He comes in from his books
and finds us all playing games and talking nonsense. Imagine what a
change from the things he thinks about, she said.
He was bearing down upon them. Now he stopped dead and stood
looking in silence at the sea. Now he had turned away again.

38
Chapter 9
Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily had
said something about his frightening her—he changed from one mood to
another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that
Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked
Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for
that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old
grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he
preach to us? was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said
nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that Carlyle
was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say that
she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion one
liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached
the whole world must come to an end. It was not THAT she minded. For
who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter
him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked
was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.
"A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr
Ramsay's back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam re-
fusing to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own
house, full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course,
he had his work… All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that Ram-
say was, as he said, "a bit of a hypocrite."
Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking
down. Looking up, there he was—Mr Ramsay—advancing towards
them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she re-
peated. Oh, no—the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the
best; but, looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyr-
annical, he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so
could she keep steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up
and saw them, what she called "being in love" flooded them. They be-
came part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is
the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds

39
sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as
she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sit-
ting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bend-
ing, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one
lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one
up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say
something criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her
way, high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it en-
tirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was consid-
ering his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and
the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as
Lily saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt,
to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had nev-
er excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought,
pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never at-
tempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear
their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the
world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world
by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that
woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her
boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific
problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when
he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants,
that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.
Such a rapture—for by what other name could one call it?—made Lily
Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of
importance; something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this "rapture,"
this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so
solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised
its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no
more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying
level across the floor.
That people should love like this, that Mr Bankes should feel this for
Mrs Ramsey (she glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting. She
wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on pur-
pose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women; she
felt herself praised. Let him gaze; she would steal a look at her picture.
She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She
could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been

40
thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte
would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the col-
our burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly's wing lying
upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks
scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never
be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, "Women
can't paint, women can't write… "
She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ram-
say. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have
been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some
highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes's glance at her,
she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he
worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr
Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to
it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of
people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too
from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how
different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of
blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now,
yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her
bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the
essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner
of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indis-
putably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was
willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am
thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insig-
nificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom
windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay
in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one's bedroom
door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was al-
ways that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might
be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and
sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, "The vegetable salts are lost." All this she
would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the
window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the
sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing,
insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole
world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared
not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ram-
say had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and

41
came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried
woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman
has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping
and Mrs Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.
Oh, but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she
dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal,
against the other. Yet, as the night wore on, and white lights parted the
curtains, and even now and then some bird chirped in the garden, gath-
ering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the
universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself;
she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes
of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs Ramsay's simple certainty (and
she was childlike now) that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was a fool.
Then, she remembered, she had laid her head on Mrs Ramsay's lap and
laughed and laughed and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the
thought of Mrs Ramsay presiding with immutable calm over destinies
which she completely failed to understand. There she sat, simple, seri-
ous. She had recovered her sense of her now—this was the glove's twis-
ted finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated? Lily Briscoe had
looked up at last, and there was Mrs Ramsay, unwitting entirely what
had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every trace of wil-
fulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear as the space which
the clouds at last uncover—the little space of sky which sleeps beside the
moon.
Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptive-
ness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were
tangled in a golden mesh? or did she lock up within her some secret
which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to
go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as
she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on
the floor with her arms round Mrs Ramsay's knees, close as she could
get, smiling to think that Mrs Ramsay would never know the reason of
that pressure, she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart
of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the
treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which
if one could spell them out, would teach one everything, but they would
never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known
to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret
chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, in-
extricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body

42
achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the
brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs
Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not in-
scriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language
known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought,
leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.
Nothing happened. Nothing! Nothing! as she leant her head against
Mrs Ramsay's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were
stored up in Mrs Ramsay's heart. How, then, she had asked herself, did
one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?
Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intan-
gible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the
wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted
the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were
people. Mrs Ramsay rose. Lily rose. Mrs Ramsay went. For days there
hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person
one has dreamt of, more vividly than anything she said, the sound of
murmuring and, as she sat in the wicker arm-chair in the drawing-room
window she wore, to Lily's eyes, an august shape; the shape of a dome.
This ray passed level with Mr Bankes's ray straight to Mrs Ramsay sit-
ting reading there with James at her knee. But now while she still looked,
Mr Bankes had done. He had put on his spectacles. He had stepped back.
He had raised his hand. He had slightly narrowed his clear blue eyes,
when Lily, rousing herself, saw what he was at, and winced like a dog
who sees a hand raised to strike it. She would have snatched her picture
off the easel, but she said to herself, One must. She braced herself to
stand the awful trial of some one looking at her picture. One must, she
said, one must. And if it must be seen, Mr Bankes was less alarming than
another. But that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three
years, the deposit of each day's living mixed with something more secret
than she had ever spoken or shown in the course of all those days was an
agony. At the same time it was immensely exciting.
Nothing could be cooler and quieter. Taking out a pen-knife, Mr
Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to
indicate by the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.
It was Mrs Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objec-
tion— that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no
attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them
then? he asked. Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was
bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious,

43
commonplace, as it was, Mr Bankes was interested. Mother and child
then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was
famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple
shadow without irreverence.
But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There
were other senses too in which one might reverence them. By a shadow
here and a light there, for instance. Her tribute took that form if, as she
vaguely supposed, a picture must be a tribute. A mother and child might
be reduced to a shadow without irreverence. A light here required a
shadow there. He considered. He was interested. He took it scientifically
in complete good faith. The truth was that all his prejudices were on the
other side, he explained. The largest picture in his drawing-room, which
painters had praised, and valued at a higher price than he had given for
it, was of the cherry trees in blossom on the banks of the Kennet. He had
spent his honeymoon on the banks of the Kennet, he said. Lily must
come and see that picture, he said. But now—he turned, with his glasses
raised to the scientific examination of her canvas. The question being one
of the relations of masses, of lights and shadows, which, to be honest, he
had never considered before, he would like to have it explained—what
then did she wish to make of it? And he indicated the scene before them.
She looked. She could not show him what she wished to make of it,
could not see it even herself, without a brush in her hand. She took up
once more her old painting position with the dim eyes and the absent-
minded manner, subduing all her impressions as a woman to something
much more general; becoming once more under the power of that vision
which she had seen clearly once and must now grope for among hedges
and houses and mothers and children—her picture. It was a question,
she remembered, how to connect this mass on the right hand with that
on the left. She might do it by bringing the line of the branch across so; or
break the vacancy in the foreground by an object (James perhaps) so. But
the danger was that by doing that the unity of the whole might be
broken. She stopped; she did not want to bore him; she took the canvas
lightly off the easel.
But it had been seen; it had been taken from her. This man had shared
with her something profoundly intimate. And, thanking Mr Ramsay for
it and Mrs Ramsay for it and the hour and the place, crediting the world
with a power which she had not suspected—that one could walk away
down that long gallery not alone any more but arm in arm with some-
body—the strangest feeling in the world, and the most exhilarating—she
nicked the catch of her paint-box to, more firmly than was necessary, and

44
the nick seemed to surround in a circle forever the paint-box, the lawn,
Mr Bankes, and that wild villain, Cam, dashing past.

45
Chapter 10
For Cam grazed the easel by an inch; she would not stop for Mr Bankes
and Lily Briscoe; though Mr Bankes, who would have liked a daughter
of his own, held out his hand; she would not stop for her father, whom
she grazed also by an inch; nor for her mother, who called "Cam! I want
you a moment!" as she dashed past. She was off like a bird, bullet, or ar-
row, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who
could say? What, what? Mrs Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might
be a vision—of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the far
side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew. But
when Mrs Ramsay called "Cam!" a second time, the projectile dropped in
mid career, and Cam came lagging back, pulling a leaf by the way, to her
mother.
What was she dreaming about, Mrs Ramsay wondered, seeing her en-
grossed, as she stood there, with some thought of her own, so that she
had to repeat the message twice—ask Mildred if Andrew, Miss Doyle,
and Mr Rayley have come back?—The words seemed to be dropped into
a well, where, if the waters were clear, they were also so extraordinarily
distorting that, even as they descended, one saw them twisting about to
make Heaven knows what pattern on the floor of the child's mind. What
message would Cam give the cook? Mrs Ramsay wondered. And indeed
it was only by waiting patiently, and hearing that there was an old wo-
man in the kitchen with very red cheeks, drinking soup out of a basin,
that Mrs Ramsay at last prompted that parrot-like instinct which had
picked up Mildred's words quite accurately and could now produce
them, if one waited, in a colourless singsong. Shifting from foot to foot,
Cam repeated the words, "No, they haven't, and I've told Ellen to clear
away tea."
Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley had not come back then. That could only
mean, Mrs Ramsay thought, one thing. She must accept him, or she must
refuse him. This going off after luncheon for a walk, even though
Andrew was with them—what could it mean? except that she had de-
cided, rightly, Mrs Ramsay thought (and she was very, very fond of

46
Minta), to accept that good fellow, who might not be brilliant, but then,
thought Mrs Ramsay, realising that James was tugging at her, to make
her go on reading aloud the Fisherman and his Wife, she did in her own
heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations;
Charles Tansley, for instance. Anyhow it must have happened, one way
or the other, by now.
But she read, "Next morning the wife awoke first, and it was just day-
break, and from her bed she saw the beautiful country lying before her.
Her husband was still stretching himself… "
But how could Minta say now that she would not have him? Not if she
agreed to spend whole afternoons trapesing about the country
alone—for Andrew would be off after his crabs—but possibly Nancy
was with them. She tried to recall the sight of them standing at the hall
door after lunch. There they stood, looking at the sky, wondering about
the weather, and she had said, thinking partly to cover their shyness,
partly to encourage them to be off (for her sympathies were with Paul),
"There isn't a cloud anywhere within miles," at which she could feel
little Charles Tansley, who had followed them out, snigger. But she did it
on purpose. Whether Nancy was there or not, she could not be certain,
looking from one to the other in her mind's eye.
She read on: "Ah, wife," said the man, "why should we be King? I do
not want to be King." "Well," said the wife, "if you won't be King, I will;
go to the Flounder, for I will be King."
"Come in or go out, Cam," she said, knowing that Cam was attracted
only by the word "Flounder" and that in a moment she would fidget and
fight with James as usual. Cam shot off. Mrs Ramsay went on reading,
relieved, for she and James shared the same tastes and were comfortable
together.
"And when he came to the sea, it was quite dark grey, and the water
heaved up from below, and smelt putrid. Then he went and stood by it
and said,
'Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
Come, I pray thee, here to me;
For my wife, good Ilsabil,
Wills not as I'd have her will.'
'Well, what does she want then?' said the Flounder." And where were
they now? Mrs Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily,
both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was
like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up
unexpectedly into the melody. And when should she be told? If nothing

47
happened, she would have to speak seriously to Minta. For she could not
go trapesing about all over the country, even if Nancy were with them
(she tried again, unsuccessfully, to visualize their backs going down the
path, and to count them). She was responsible to Minta's parents—the
Owl and the Poker. Her nicknames for them shot into her mind as she
read. The Owl and the Poker—yes, they would be annoyed if they
heard—and they were certain to hear—that Minta, staying with the
Ramsays, had been seen etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. "He wore a wig in the
House of Commons and she ably assisted him at the head of the stairs,"
she repeated, fishing them up out of her mind by a phrase which, com-
ing back from some party, she had made to amuse her husband. Dear,
dear, Mrs Ramsay said to herself, how did they produce this incongru-
ous daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her stocking? How did
she exist in that portentous atmosphere where the maid was always re-
moving in a dust-pan the sand that the parrot had scattered, and conver-
sation was almost entirely reduced to the exploits—interesting perhaps,
but limited after all—of that bird? Naturally, one had asked her to lunch,
tea, dinner, finally to stay with them up at Finlay, which had resulted in
some friction with the Owl, her mother, and more calling, and more con-
versation, and more sand, and really at the end of it, she had told enough
lies about parrots to last her a lifetime (so she had said to her husband
that night, coming back from the party). However, Minta came… Yes,
she came, Mrs Ramsay thought, suspecting some thorn in the tangle of
this thought; and disengaging it found it to be this: a woman had once
accused her of "robbing her of her daughter's affections"; something Mrs
Doyle had said made her remember that charge again. Wishing to dom-
inate, wishing to interfere, making people do what she wished—that was
the charge against her, and she thought it most unjust. How could she
help being "like that" to look at? No one could accuse her of taking pains
to impress. She was often ashamed of her own shabbiness. Nor was she
domineering, nor was she tyrannical. It was more true about hospitals
and drains and the dairy. About things like that she did feel passion-
ately, and would, if she had the chance, have liked to take people by the
scruff of their necks and make them see. No hospital on the whole island.
It was a disgrace. Milk delivered at your door in London positively
brown with dirt. It should be made illegal. A model dairy and a hospital
up here—those two things she would have liked to do, herself. But how?
With all these children? When they were older, then perhaps she would
have time; when they were all at school.

48
 Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! or Cam either.
These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were,
demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into
long-legged monsters. Nothing made up up for the loss. When she read
just now to James, "and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums
and trumpets," and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they
grow up and lose all that? He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of
her children. But all, she thought, were full of promise. Prue, a perfect
angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially, she took
one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew—even her husband admit-
ted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Ro-
ger, they were both wild creatures now, scampering about over the
country all day long. As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a
wonderful gift with her hands. If they had charades, Rose made the
dresses; made everything; liked best arranging tables, flowers, anything.
She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it was only a stage;
they all went through stages. Why, she asked, pressing her chin on
James's head, should they grow up so fast? Why should they go to
school? She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happi-
est carrying one in her arms. Then people might say she was tyrannical,
domineering, masterful, if they chose; she did not mind. And, touching
his hair with her lips, she thought, he will never be so happy again, but
stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she
should say that. Still, it was true. They were happier now than they
would ever be again. A tenpenny tea set made Cam happy for days. She
heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the mo-
ment they awoke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door
sprang open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if
this coming into the dining-room after breakfast, which they did every
day of their lives, was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing
after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-night to them,
and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and rasp-
berries, still making up stories about some little bit of rub-
bish—something they had heard, something they had picked up in the
garden. They all had their little treasures… And so she went down and
said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will
they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy
view of life? he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and she believed it
to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more
hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human

49
worries—perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on.
Not that she herself was "pessimistic," as he accused her of being. Only
she thought life—and a little strip of time presented itself to her
eyes—her fifty years. There it was before her—life. Life, she
thought—but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for
she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private,
which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort
of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and
life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it
was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there
were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part,
oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life
terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.
There were eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was al-
ways a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all
these children, You shall go through it all. To eight people she had said
relentlessly that (and the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds).
For that reason, knowing what was before them—love and ambition and
being wretched alone in dreary places—she had often the feeling, Why
must they grow up and lose it all? And then she said to herself, bran-
dishing her sword at life, Nonsense. They will be perfectly happy. And
here she was, she reflected, feeling life rather sinister again, making
Minta marry Paul Rayley; because whatever she might feel about her
own transaction, she had had experiences which need not happen to
every one (she did not name them to herself); she was driven on, too
quickly she knew, almost as if it were an escape for her too, to say that
people must marry; people must have children.
Was she wrong in this, she asked herself, reviewing her conduct for
the past week or two, and wondering if she had indeed put any pressure
upon Minta, who was only twenty-four, to make up her mind. She was
uneasy. Had she not laughed about it? Was she not forgetting again how
strongly she influenced people? Marriage needed—oh, all sorts of qualit-
ies (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one—she need
not name it—that was essential; the thing she had with her husband.
Had they that?
"Then he put on his trousers and ran away like a madman," she read.
"But outside a great storm was raging and blowing so hard that he could
scarcely keep his feet; houses and trees toppled over, the mountains
trembled, rocks rolled into the sea, the sky was pitch black, and it

50
thundered and lightened, and the sea came in with black waves as high
as church towers and mountains, and all with white foam at the top."
She turned the page; there were only a few lines more, so that she
would finish the story, though it was past bed-time. It was getting late.
The light in the garden told her that; and the whitening of the flowers
and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse in her a
feeling of anxiety. What it was about she could not think at first. Then
she remembered; Paul and Minta and Andrew had not come back. She
summoned before her again the little group on the terrace in front of the
hall door, standing looking up into the sky. Andrew had his net and bas-
ket. That meant he was going to catch crabs and things. That meant he
would climb out on to a rock; he would be cut off. Or coming back single
file on one of those little paths above the cliff one of them might slip. He
would roll and then crash. It was growing quite dark.
But she did not let her voice change in the least as she finished the
story, and added, shutting the book, and speaking the last words as if
she had made them up herself, looking into James's eyes: "And there
they are living still at this very time."
"And that's the end," she said, and she saw in his eyes, as the interest
of the story died away in them, something else take its place; something
wondering, pale, like the reflection of a light, which at once made him
gaze and marvel. Turning, she looked across the bay, and there, sure
enough, coming regularly across the waves first two quick strokes and
then one long steady stroke, was the light of the Lighthouse. It had been
lit.
In a moment he would ask her, "Are we going to the Lighthouse?"
And she would have to say, "No: not tomorrow; your father says not."
Happily, Mildred came in to fetch them, and the bustle distracted them.
But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out,
and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Light-
house tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life.

51
Chapter 11
No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out— a
refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress— children
never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and
what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she
need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that
was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to
think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive,
glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity,
to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible
to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus
that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for
the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range
of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this
sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily,
Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know
us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is
unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is
what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all
the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing
aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness
could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she
thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most
welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stabil-
ity. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accom-
plished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of
darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and
there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when
things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing
there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long
steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching
them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching one-
self to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long

52
steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and look-
ing, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the
thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would lift up on it
some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like
that—"Children don't forget, children don't forget"—which she would
repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will
come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the
Lord.
But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had
said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not
mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it
seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she
alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of exist-
ence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without
vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that
light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanim-
ate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they be-
came one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational ten-
derness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There
rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there
curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a
mist, a bride to meet her lover.
What brought her to say that: "We are in the hands of the Lord?" she
wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, an-
noyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have
made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the
fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.
There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that.
No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure,
slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and
composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her hus-
band passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the
philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog, he could not
help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It
saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed,
that he could not protect her, and, when he reached the hedge, he was
sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her.
Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was ir-
ritable—he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He
looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.

53
 Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluct-
antly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight.
She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were
in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting;
she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a mo-
ment. She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for
when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady
light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little
her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it
bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought,
watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its
silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would
flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness,
intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,
as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves
of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and
the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the
floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he
thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her. He
wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was
alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She was
aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be,
and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should
look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help
her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at
that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he
would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the
picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her.

54
Chapter 12
She folded the green shawl about her shoulders. She took his arm. His
beauty was so great, she said, beginning to speak of Kennedy the
gardener, at once he was so awfully handsome, that she couldn't dismiss
him. There was a ladder against the greenhouse, and little lumps of
putty stuck about, for they were beginning to mend the greenhouse. Yes,
but as she strolled along with her husband, she felt that that particular
source of worry had been placed. She had it on the tip of her tongue to
say, as they strolled, "It'll cost fifty pounds," but instead, for her heart
failed her about money, she talked about Jasper shooting birds, and he
said, at once, soothing her instantly, that it was natural in a boy, and he
trusted he would find better ways of amusing himself before long. Her
husband was so sensible, so just. And so she said, "Yes; all children go
through stages," and began considering the dahlias in the big bed, and
wondering what about next year's flowers, and had he heard the
children's nickname for Charles Tansley, she asked. The atheist, they
called him, the little atheist. "He's not a polished specimen," said Mr
Ramsay. "Far from it," said Mrs Ramsay.
She supposed it was all right leaving him to his own devices, Mrs
Ramsay said, wondering whether it was any use sending down bulbs;
did they plant them? "Oh, he has his dissertation to write," said Mr Ram-
say. She knew all about THAT, said Mrs Ramsay. He talked of nothing
else. It was about the influence of somebody upon something. "Well, it's
all he has to count on," said Mr Ramsay. "Pray Heaven he won't fall in
love with Prue," said Mrs Ramsay. He'd disinherit her if she married
him, said Mr Ramsay. He did not look at the flowers, which his wife was
considering, but at a spot about a foot or so above them. There was no
harm in him, he added, and was just about to say that anyhow he was
the only young man in England who admired his—when he choked it
back. He would not bother her again about his books. These flowers
seemed creditable, Mr Ramsay said, lowering his gaze and noticing
something red, something brown. Yes, but then these she had put in
with her own hands, said Mrs Ramsay. The question was, what

55
happened if she sent bulbs down; did Kennedy plant them? It was his in-
curable laziness; she added, moving on. If she stood over him all day
long with a spade in her hand, he did sometimes do a stroke of work. So
they strolled along, towards the red-hot pokers. "You're teaching your
daughters to exaggerate," said Mr Ramsay, reproving her. Her Aunt Ca-
milla was far worse than she was, Mrs Ramsay remarked. "Nobody ever
held up your Aunt Camilla as a model of virtue that I'm aware of," said
Mr Ramsay. "She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw," said Mrs
Ramsay. "Somebody else was that," said Mr Ramsay. Prue was going to
be far more beautiful than she was, said Mrs Ramsay. He saw no trace of
it, said Mr Ramsay. "Well, then, look tonight," said Mrs Ramsay. They
paused. He wished Andrew could be induced to work harder. He would
lose every chance of a scholarship if he didn't. "Oh, scholarships!" she
said. Mr Ramsay thought her foolish for saying that, about a serious
thing, like a scholarship. He should be very proud of Andrew if he got a
scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she
answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She
liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of
Andrew whatever he did. Suddenly she remembered those little paths
on the edge of the cliffs.
Wasn't it late? she asked. They hadn't come home yet. He flicked his
watch carelessly open. But it was only just past seven. He held his watch
open for a moment, deciding that he would tell her what he had felt on
the terrace. To begin with, it was not reasonable to be so nervous.
Andrew could look after himself. Then, he wanted to tell her that when
he was walking on the terrace just now—here he became uncomfortable,
as if he were breaking into that solitude, that aloofness, that remoteness
of hers. But she pressed him. What had he wanted to tell her, she asked,
thinking it was about going to the Lighthouse; that he was sorry he had
said "Damn you." But no. He did not like to see her look so sad, he said.
Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt un-
comfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back. She
had been reading fairy tales to James, she said. No, they could not share
that; they could not say that.
They had reached the gap between the two clumps of red-hot pokers,
and there was the Lighthouse again, but she would not let herself look at
it. Had she known that he was looking at her, she thought, she would
not have let herself sit there, thinking. She disliked anything that re-
minded her that she had been seen sitting thinking. So she looked over
her shoulder, at the town. The lights were rippling and running as if they

56
were drops of silver water held firm in a wind. And all the poverty, all
the suffering had turned to that, Mrs Ramsay thought. The lights of the
town and of the harbour and of the boats seemed like a phantom net
floating there to mark something which had sunk. Well, if he could not
share her thoughts, Mr Ramsay said to himself, he would be off, then, on
his own. He wanted to go on thinking, telling himself the story how
Hume was stuck in a bog; he wanted to laugh. But first it was nonsense
to be anxious about Andrew. When he was Andrew's age he used to
walk about the country all day long, with nothing but a biscuit in his
pocket and nobody bothered about him, or thought that he had fallen
over a cliff. He said aloud he thought he would be off for a day's walk if
the weather held. He had had about enough of Bankes and of Carmi-
chael. He would like a little solitude. Yes, she said. It annoyed him that
she did not protest. She knew that he would never do it. He was too old
now to walk all day long with a biscuit in his pocket. She worried about
the boys, but not about him. Years ago, before he had married, he
thought, looking across the bay, as they stood between the clumps of
red-hot pokers, he had walked all day. He had made a meal off bread
and cheese in a public house. He had worked ten hours at a stretch; an
old woman just popped her head in now and again and saw to the fire.
That was the country he liked best, over there; those sandhills dwindling
away into darkness. One could walk all day without meeting a soul.
There was not a house scarcely, not a single village for miles on end. One
could worry things out alone. There were little sandy beaches where no
one had been since the beginning of time. The seals sat up and looked at
you. It sometimes seemed to him that in a little house out there,
alone—he broke off, sighing. He had no right. The father of eight chil-
dren—he reminded himself. And he would have been a beast and a cur
to wish a single thing altered. Andrew would be a better man than he
had been. Prue would be a beauty, her mother said. They would stem
the flood a bit. That was a good bit of work on the whole—his eight chil-
dren. They showed he did not damn the poor little universe entirely, for
on an evening like this, he thought, looking at the land dwindling away,
the little island seemed pathetically small, half swallowed up in the sea.
"Poor little place," he murmured with a sigh.
She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed
that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usu-
al. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said
half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.

57
 It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-
of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he
groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she
guessed what he was thinking—he would have written better books if he
had not married.
He was not complaining, he said. She knew that he did not complain.
She knew that he had nothing whatever to complain of. And he seized
her hand and raised it to his lips and kissed it with an intensity that
brought the tears to her eyes, and quickly he dropped it.
They turned away from the view and began to walk up the path where
the silver-green spear-like plants grew, arm in arm. His arm was almost
like a young man's arm, Mrs Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she
thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty,
and how untamed and optimistic, and how strange it was that being
convinced, as he was, of all sorts of horrors, seemed not to depress him,
but to cheer him. Was it not odd, she reflected? Indeed he seemed to her
sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and
dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an
eye like an eagle's. His understanding often astonished her. But did he
notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice
his own daughter's beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or
roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream. And
his habit of talking aloud, or saying poetry aloud, was growing on him,
she was afraid; for sometimes it was awkward—
Best and brightest come away!
poor Miss Giddings, when he shouted that at her, almost jumped out
of her skin. But then, Mrs Ramsay, though instantly taking his side
against all the silly Giddingses in the world, then, she thought, intimat-
ing by a little pressure on his arm that he walked up hill too fast for her,
and she must stop for a moment to see whether those were fresh mole-
hills on the bank, then, she thought, stooping down to look, a great mind
like his must be different in every way from ours. All the great men she
had ever known, she thought, deciding that a rabbit must have got in,
were like that, and it was good for young men (though the atmosphere
of lecture-rooms was stuffy and depressing to her beyond endurance al-
most) simply to hear him, simply to look at him. But without shooting
rabbits, how was one to keep them down? she wondered. It might be a
rabbit; it might be a mole. Some creature anyhow was ruining her Even-
ing Primroses. And looking up, she saw above the thin trees the first
pulse of the full-throbbing star, and wanted to make her husband look at

58
it; for the sight gave her such keen pleasure. But she stopped herself. He
never looked at things. If he did, all he would say would be, Poor little
world, with one of his sighs.
At that moment, he said, "Very fine," to please her, and pretended to
admire the flowers. But she knew quite well that he did not admire
them, or even realise that they were there. It was only to please her. Ah,
but was that not Lily Briscoe strolling along with William Bankes? She
focussed her short-sighted eyes upon the backs of a retreating couple.
Yes, indeed it was. Did that not mean that they would marry? Yes, it
must! What an admirable idea! They must marry!

59
Chapter 13
He had been to Amsterdam, Mr Bankes was saying as he strolled across
the lawn with Lily Briscoe. He had seen the Rembrandts. He had been to
Madrid. Unfortunately, it was Good Friday and the Prado was shut. He
had been to Rome. Had Miss Briscoe never been to Rome? Oh, she
should—It would be a wonderful experience for her—the Sistine Chapel;
Michael Angelo; and Padua, with its Giottos. His wife had been in bad
health for many years, so that their sight-seeing had been on a modest
scale.
She had been to Brussels; she had been to Paris but only for a flying
visit to see an aunt who was ill. She had been to Dresden; there were
masses of pictures she had not seen; however, Lily Briscoe reflected, per-
haps it was better not to see pictures: they only made one hopelessly dis-
contented with one's own work. Mr Bankes thought one could carry that
point of view too far. We can't all be Titians and we can't all be Darwins,
he said; at the same time he doubted whether you could have your Dar-
win and your Titian if it weren't for humble people like ourselves. Lily
would have liked to pay him a compliment; you're not humble, Mr
Bankes, she would have liked to have said. But he did not want compli-
ments (most men do, she thought), and she was a little ashamed of her
impulse and said nothing while he remarked that perhaps what he was
saying did not apply to pictures. Anyhow, said Lily, tossing off her little
insincerity, she would always go on painting, because it interested her.
Yes, said Mr Bankes, he was sure she would, and, as they reached the
end of the lawn he was asking her whether she had difficulty in finding
subjects in London when they turned and saw the Ramsays. So that is
marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman looking at a girl throwing a
ball. That is what Mrs Ramsay tried to tell me the other night, she
thought. For she was wearing a green shawl, and they were standing
close together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches. And sud-
denly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are step-
ping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making
them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and

60
made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, hus-
band and wife. Then, after an instant, the symbolical outline which tran-
scended the real figures sank down again, and they became, as they met
them, Mr and Mrs Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. But
still for a moment, though Mrs Ramsay greeted them with her usual
smile (oh, she's thinking we're going to get married, Lily thought) and
said, "I have triumphed tonight," meaning that for once Mr Bankes had
agreed to dine with them and not run off to his own lodging where his
man cooked vegetables properly; still, for one moment, there was a sense
of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball
soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the
draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and eth-
ereal and divided by great distances. Then, darting backwards over the
vast space (for it seemed as if solidity had vanished altogether), Prue ran
full tilt into them and caught the ball brilliantly high up in her left hand,
and her mother said, "Haven't they come back yet?" whereupon the spell
was broken. Mr Ramsay felt free now to laugh out loud at the thought
that Hume had stuck in a bog and an old woman rescued him on condi-
tion he said the Lord's Prayer, and chuckling to himself he strolled off to
his study. Mrs Ramsay, bringing Prue back into throwing catches again,
from which she had escaped, asked,
"Did Nancy go with them?"

61
Chapter 14
(Certainly, Nancy had gone with them, since Minta Doyle had asked it
with her dumb look, holding out her hand, as Nancy made off, after
lunch, to her attic, to escape the horror of family life. She supposed she
must go then. She did not want to go. She did not want to be drawn into
it all. For as they walked along the road to the cliff Minta kept on taking
her hand. Then she would let it go. Then she would take it again. What
was it she wanted? Nancy asked herself. There was something, of course,
that people wanted; for when Minta took her hand and held it, Nancy,
reluctantly, saw the whole world spread out beneath her, as if it were
Constantinople seen through a mist, and then, however heavy-eyed one
might be, one must needs ask, "Is that Santa Sofia?" "Is that the Golden
Horn?" So Nancy asked, when Minta took her hand. "What is it that she
wants? Is it that?" And what was that? Here and there emerged from the
mist (as Nancy looked down upon life spread beneath her) a pinnacle, a
dome; prominent things, without names. But when Minta dropped her
hand, as she did when they ran down the hillside, all that, the dome, the
pinnacle, whatever it was that had protruded through the mist, sank
down into it and disappeared. Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a
good walker. She wore more sensible clothes that most women. She
wore very short skirts and black knickerbockers. She would jump
straight into a stream and flounder across. He liked her rashness, but he
saw that it would not do—she would kill herself in some idiotic way one
of these days. She seemed to be afraid of nothing—except bulls. At the
mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly
screaming, which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course. But she
did not mind owning up to it in the least; one must admit that. She knew
she was an awful coward about bulls, she said. She thought she must
have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby. She didn't
seem to mind what she said or did. Suddenly now she pitched down on
the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about
Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.
They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:

62
 Damn your eyes, damn your eyes,
but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good
hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.
"Fatal," Paul agreed, springing up, and as they went slithering down,
he kept quoting the guide-book about "these islands being justly celeb-
rated for their park-like prospects and the extent and variety of their
marine curiosities." But it would not do altogether, this shouting and
damning your eyes, Andrew felt, picking his way down the cliff, this
clapping him on the back, and calling him "old fellow" and all that; it
would not altogether do. It was the worst of taking women on walks.
Once on the beach they separated, he going out on to the Pope's Nose,
taking his shoes off, and rolling his socks in them and letting that couple
look after themselves; Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched
her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched
low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were
stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed
the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales,
and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the
sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to mil-
lions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away
suddenly and let the sun stream down. Out on the pale criss-crossed
sand, high-stepping, fringed, gauntleted, stalked some fantastic leviath-
an (she was still enlarging the pool), and slipped into the vast fissures of
the mountain side. And then, letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above
the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks
which the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became
with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing,
hypnotised, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the
pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel that she
was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings
which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people
in the world, for ever, to nothingness. So listening to the waves, crouch-
ing over the pool, she brooded.
And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in, so she leapt splash-
ing through the shallow waves on to the shore and ran up the beach and
was carried by her own impetuosity and her desire for rapid movement
right behind a rock and there—oh, heavens! in each other's arms, were
Paul and Minta kissing probably. She was outraged, indignant. She and
Andrew put on their shoes and stockings in dead silence without saying
a thing about it. Indeed they were rather sharp with each other. She

63
might have called him when she saw the crayfish or whatever it was,
Andrew grumbled. However, they both felt, it's not our fault. They had
not wanted this horrid nuisance to happen. All the same it irritated
Andrew that Nancy should be a woman, and Nancy that Andrew should
be a man, and they tied their shoes very neatly and drew the bows rather
tight.
It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff
again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmother's brooch—
her grandmother's brooch, the sole ornament she possessed—a weeping
willow, it was (they must remember it) set in pearls. They must have
seen it, she said, with the tears running down her cheeks, the brooch
which her grandmother had fastened her cap with till the last day of her
life. Now she had lost it. She would rather have lost anything than that!
She would go back and look for it. They all went back. They poked and
peered and looked. They kept their heads very low, and said things
shortly and gruffly. Paul Rayley searched like a madman all about the
rock where they had been sitting. All this pother about a brooch really
didn't do at all, Andrew thought, as Paul told him to make a "thorough
search between this point and that." The tide was coming in fast. The sea
would cover the place where they had sat in a minute. There was not a
ghost of a chance of their finding it now. "We shall be cut off!" Minta
shrieked, suddenly terrified. As if there were any danger of that! It was
the same as the bulls all over again—she had no control over her emo-
tions, Andrew thought. Women hadn't. The wretched Paul had to pacify
her. The men (Andrew and Paul at once became manly, and different
from usual) took counsel briefly and decided that they would plant
Rayley's stick where they had sat and come back at low tide again. There
was nothing more that could be done now. If the brooch was there, it
would still be there in the morning, they assured her, but Minta still
sobbed, all the way up to the top of the cliff. It was her grandmother's
brooch; she would rather have lost anything but that, and yet Nancy felt,
it might be true that she minded losing her brooch, but she wasn't crying
only for that. She was crying for something else. We might all sit down
and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for.
They drew ahead together, Paul and Minta, and he comforted her, and
said how famous he was for finding things. Once when he was a little
boy he had found a gold watch. He would get up at daybreak and he
was positive he would find it. It seemed to him that it would be almost
dark, and he would be alone on the beach, and somehow it would be
rather dangerous. He began telling her, however, that he would certainly

64
find it, and she said that she would not hear of his getting up at dawn: it
was lost: she knew that: she had had a presentiment when she put it on
that afternoon. And secretly he resolved that he would not tell her, but
he would slip out of the house at dawn when they were all asleep and if
he could not find it he would go to Edinburgh and buy her another, just
like it but more beautiful. He would prove what he could do. And as
they came out on the hill and saw the lights of the town beneath them,
the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were
going to happen to him—his marriage, his children, his house; and again
he thought, as they came out on to the high road, which was shaded
with high bushes, how they would retreat into solitude together, and
walk on and on, he always leading her, and she pressing close to his side
(as she did now). As they turned by the cross roads he thought what an
appalling experience he had been through, and he must tell some
one—Mrs Ramsay of course, for it took his breath away to think what he
had been and done. It had been far and away the worst moment of his
life when he asked Minta to marry him. He would go straight to Mrs
Ramsay, because he felt somehow that she was the person who had
made him do it. She had made him think he could do anything. Nobody
else took him seriously. But she made him believe that he could do
whatever he wanted. He had felt her eyes on him all day today, follow-
ing him about (though she never said a word) as if she were saying, "Yes,
you can do it. I believe in you. I expect it of you." She had made him feel
all that, and directly they got back (he looked for the lights of the house
above the bay) he would go to her and say, "I've done it, Mrs Ramsay;
thanks to you." And so turning into the lane that led to the house he
could see lights moving about in the upper windows. They must be aw-
fully late then. People were getting ready for dinner. The house was all
lit up, and the lights after the darkness made his eyes feel full, and he
said to himself, childishly, as he walked up the drive, Lights, lights,
lights, and repeated in a dazed way, Lights, lights, lights, as they came
into the house staring about him with his face quite stiff. But, good heav-
ens, he said to himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool
of myself.)

65
Chapter 15
"Yes," said Prue, in her considering way, answering her mother's ques-
tion, "I think Nancy did go with them."

66
Chapter 16
Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs Ramsay supposed, wonder-
ing, as she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said "Come in" to a
tap at the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy
was with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would
happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs Ramsay felt, very irration-
ally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable.
They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence
of her old antagonist, life.
Jasper and Rose said that Mildred wanted to know whether she
should wait dinner.
"Not for the Queen of England," said Mrs Ramsay emphatically.
"Not for the Empress of Mexico," she added, laughing at Jasper; for he
shared his mother's vice: he, too, exaggerated.
And if Rose liked, she said, while Jasper took the message, she might
choose which jewels she was to wear. When there are fifteen people sit-
ting down to dinner, one cannot keep things waiting for ever. She was
now beginning to feel annoyed with them for being so late; it was incon-
siderate of them, and it annoyed her on top of her anxiety about them,
that they should choose this very night to be out late, when, in fact, she
wished the dinner to be particularly nice, since William Bankes had at
last consented to dine with them; and they were having Mildred's mas-
terpiece—BOEUF EN DAUBE. Everything depended upon things being
served up to the precise moment they were ready. The beef, the bayleaf,
and the wine—all must be done to a turn. To keep it waiting was out of
the question. Yet of course tonight, of all nights, out they went, and they
came in late, and things had to be sent out, things had to be kept hot; the
BOEUF EN DAUBE would be entirely spoilt.
Jasper offered her an opal necklace; Rose a gold necklace. Which
looked best against her black dress? Which did indeed, said Mrs Ramsay
absent-mindedly, looking at her neck and shoulders (but avoiding her
face) in the glass. And then, while the children rummaged among her
things, she looked out of the window at a sight which always amused

67
her—the rooks trying to decide which tree to settle on. Every time, they
seemed to change their minds and rose up into the air again, because,
she thought, the old rook, the father rook, old Joseph was her name for
him, was a bird of a very trying and difficult disposition. He was a dis-
reputable old bird, with half his wing feathers missing. He was like some
seedy old gentleman in a top hat she had seen playing the horn in front
of a public house.
"Look!" she said, laughing. They were actually fighting. Joseph and
Mary were fighting. Anyhow they all went up again, and the air was
shoved aside by their black wings and cut into exquisite scimitar shapes.
The movements of the wings beating out, out, out—she could never de-
scribe it accurately enough to please herself—was one of the loveliest of
all to her. Look at that, she said to Rose, hoping that Rose would see it
more clearly than she could. For one's children so often gave one's own
perceptions a little thrust forwards.
But which was it to be? They had all the trays of her jewel-case open.
The gold necklace, which was Italian, or the opal necklace, which Uncle
James had brought her from India; or should she wear her amethysts?
"Choose, dearests, choose," she said, hoping that they would make
haste.
But she let them take their time to choose: she let Rose, particularly,
take up this and then that, and hold her jewels against the black dress,
for this little ceremony of choosing jewels, which was gone through
every night, was what Rose liked best, she knew. She had some hidden
reason of her own for attaching great importance to this choosing what
her mother was to wear. What was the reason, Mrs Ramsay wondered,
standing still to let her clasp the necklace she had chosen, divining,
through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless
feeling that one had for one's mother at Rose's age. Like all feelings felt
for oneself, Mrs Ramsay thought, it made one sad. It was so inadequate,
what one could give in return; and what Rose felt was quite out of pro-
portion to anything she actually was. And Rose would grow up; and
Rose would suffer, she supposed, with these deep feelings, and she said
she was ready now, and they would go down, and Jasper, because he
was the gentleman, should give her his arm, and Rose, as she was the
lady, should carry her handkerchief (she gave her the handkerchief), and
what else? oh, yes, it might be cold: a shawl. Choose me a shawl, she
said, for that would please Rose, who was bound to suffer so. "There,"
she said, stopping by the window on the landing, "there they are again."
Joseph had settled on another tree- top. "Don't you think they mind," she

68
said to Jasper, "having their wings broken?" Why did he want to shoot
poor old Joseph and Mary? He shuffled a little on the stairs, and felt re-
buked, but not seriously, for she did not understand the fun of shooting
birds; and they did not feel; and being his mother she lived away in an-
other division of the world, but he rather liked her stories about Mary
and Joseph. She made him laugh. But how did she know that those were
Mary and Joseph? Did she think the same birds came to the same trees
every night? he asked. But here, suddenly, like all grown-up people, she
ceased to pay him the least attention. She was listening to a clatter in the
hall.
"They've come back!" she exclaimed, and at once she felt much more
annoyed with them than relieved. Then she wondered, had it happened?
She would go down and they would tell her—but no. They could not tell
her anything, with all these people about. So she must go down and be-
gin dinner and wait. And, like some queen who, finding her people
gathered in the hall, looks down upon them, and descends among them,
and acknowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and
their prostration before her (Paul did not move a muscle but looked
straight before him as she passed) she went down, and crossed the hall
and bowed her head very slightly, as if she accepted what they could not
say: their tribute to her beauty.
But she stopped. There was a smell of burning. Could they have let the
BOEUF EN DAUBE overboil? she wondered, pray heaven not! when the
great clangour of the gong announced solemnly, authoritatively, that all
those scattered about, in attics, in bedrooms, on little perches of their
own, reading, writing, putting the last smooth to their hair, or fastening
dresses, must leave all that, and the little odds and ends on their
washing-tables and dressing tables, and the novels on the bed- tables,
and the diaries which were so private, and assemble in the dining-room
for dinner.

69
Chapter 17
But what have I done with my life? thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her
place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white
circles on it. "William, sit by me," she said. "Lily," she said, wearily, "over
there." They had that—Paul Rayley and Minta Doyle—she, only this—an
infinitely long table and plates and knives. At the far end was her hus-
band, sitting down, all in a heap, frowning. What at? She did not know.
She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any
emotion or affection for him. She had a sense of being past everything,
through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there
was an eddy—there— and one could be in it, or one could be out of it,
and she was out of it. It's all come to an end, she thought, while they
came in one after another, Charles Tansley—"Sit there, please," she
said—Augustus Carmichael—and sat down. And meanwhile she
waited, passively, for some one to answer her, for something to happen.
But this is not a thing, she thought, ladling out soup, that one says.
Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was
thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more
and more strongly, outside that eddy; or as if a shade had fallen, and,
robbed of colour, she saw things truly. The room (she looked round it)
was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forebore to look at
Mr Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And
the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on
her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if
she did not do it nobody would do it, and so, giving herself a little shake
that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began
beating, as the watch begins ticking—one, two, three, one, two, three.
And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and foster-
ing the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a news-
paper. And so then, she concluded, addressing herself by bending si-
lently in his direction to William Bankes—poor man! who had no wife,
and no children and dined alone in lodgings except for tonight; and in
pity for him, life being now strong enough to bear her on again, she

70
began all this business, as a sailor not without weariness sees the wind
fill his sail and yet hardly wants to be off again and thinks how, had the
ship sunk, he would have whirled round and round and found rest on
the floor of the sea.
"Did you find your letters? I told them to put them in the hall for you,"
she said to William Bankes.
Lily Briscoe watched her drifting into that strange no-man's land
where to follow people is impossible and yet their going inflicts such a
chill on those who watch them that they always try at least to follow
them with their eyes as one follows a fading ship until the sails have
sunk beneath the horizon.
How old she looks, how worn she looks, Lily thought, and how re-
mote. Then when she turned to William Bankes, smiling, it was as if the
ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again, and Lily thought
with some amusement because she was relieved, Why does she pity
him? For that was the impression she gave, when she told him that his
letters were in the hall. Poor William Bankes, she seemed to be saying, as
if her own weariness had been partly pitying people, and the life in her,
her resolve to live again, had been stirred by pity. And it was not true,
Lily thought; it was one of those misjudgments of hers that seemed to be
instinctive and to arise from some need of her own rather than of other
people's. He is not in the least pitiable. He has his work, Lily said to her-
self. She remembered, all of a sudden as if she had found a treasure, that
she had her work. In a flash she saw her picture, and thought, Yes, I shall
put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space.
That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up
the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower pattern in the table-
cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.
"It's odd that one scarcely gets anything worth having by post, yet one
always wants one's letters," said Mr Bankes.
What damned rot they talk, thought Charles Tansley, laying down his
spoon precisely in the middle of his plate, which he had swept clean, as
if, Lily thought (he sat opposite to her with his back to the window pre-
cisely in the middle of view), he were determined to make sure of his
meals. Everything about him had that meagre fixity, that bare unloveli-
ness. But nevertheless, the fact remained, it was impossible to dislike any
one if one looked at them. She liked his eyes; they were blue, deep set,
frightening.
"Do you write many letters, Mr Tansley?" asked Mrs Ramsay, pitying
him too, Lily supposed; for that was true of Mrs Ramsay—she pitied

71
men always as if they lacked something—women never, as if they had
something. He wrote to his mother; otherwise he did not suppose he
wrote one letter a month, said Mr Tansley, shortly.
For he was not going to talk the sort of rot these condescended to by
these silly women. He had been reading in his room, and now he came
down and it all seemed to him silly, superficial, flimsy. Why did they
dress? He had come down in his ordinary clothes. He had not got any
dress clothes. "One never gets anything worth having by post"—that was
the sort of thing they were always saying. They made men say that sort
of thing. Yes, it was pretty well true, he thought. They never got any-
thing worth having from one year's end to another. They did nothing but
talk, talk, talk, eat, eat, eat. It was the women's fault. Women made civil-
isation impossible with all their "charm," all their silliness.
"No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mrs Ramsay," he said, assert-
ing himself. He liked her; he admired her; he still thought of the man in
the drain-pipe looking up at her; but he felt it necessary to assert himself.
He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look
at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she
had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women can't write,
women can't paint—what did that matter coming from him, since clearly
it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was
why he said it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind,
and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather
painful effort? She must make it once more. There's the sprig on the
table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that
matters—nothing else. Could she not hold fast to that, she asked herself,
and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if she wanted revenge take it
by laughing at him?
"Oh, Mr Tansley," she said, "do take me to the Lighthouse with you. I
should so love it."
She was telling lies he could see. She was saying what she did not
mean to annoy him, for some reason. She was laughing at him. He was
in his old flannel trousers. He had no others. He felt very rough and isol-
ated and lonely. He knew that she was trying to tease him for some reas-
on; she didn't want to go to the Lighthouse with him; she despised him:
so did Prue Ramsay; so did they all. But he was not going to be made a
fool of by women, so he turned deliberately in his chair and looked out
of the window and said, all in a jerk, very rudely, it would be too rough
for her tomorrow. She would be sick.

72
 It annoyed him that she should have made him speak like that, with
Mrs Ramsay listening. If only he could be alone in his room working, he
thought, among his books. That was where he felt at his ease. And he
had never run a penny into debt; he had never cost his father a penny
since he was fifteen; he had helped them at home out of his savings; he
was educating his sister. Still, he wished he had known how to answer
Miss Briscoe properly; he wished it had not come out all in a jerk like
that. "You'd be sick." He wished he could think of something to say to
Mrs Ramsay, something which would show her that he was not just a
dry prig. That was what they all thought him. He turned to her. But Mrs
Ramsay was talking about people he had never heard of to William
Bankes.
"Yes, take it away," she said briefly, interrupting what she was saying
to William Bankes to speak to the maid. "It must have been fifteen— no,
twenty years ago—that I last saw her," she was saying, turning back to
him again as if she could not lose a moment of their talk, for she was ab-
sorbed by what they were saying. So he had actually heard from her this
evening! And was Carrie still living at Marlow, and was everything still
the same? Oh, she could remember it as if it were yesterday—on the
river, feeling it as if it were yesterday—going on the river, feeling very
cold. But if the Mannings made a plan they stuck to it. Never should she
forget Herbert killing a wasp with a teaspoon on the bank! And it was
still going on, Mrs Ramsay mused, gliding like a ghost among the chairs
and tables of that drawing-room on the banks of the Thames where she
had been so very, very cold twenty years ago; but now she went among
them like a ghost; and it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that
particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there,
all these years. Had Carrie written to him herself? she asked.
"Yes. She says they're building a new billiard room," he said. No! No!
That was out of the question! Building a new billiard room! It seemed to
her impossible.
Mr Bankes could not see that there was anything very odd about it.
They were very well off now. Should he give her love to Carrie?
"Oh," said Mrs Ramsay with a little start, "No," she added, reflecting
that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room. But how
strange, she repeated, to Mr Bankes's amusement, that they should be
going on there still. For it was extraordinary to think that they had been
capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of
them more than once all that time. How eventful her own life had been,

73
during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie Manning had not thought
about her, either. The thought was strange and distasteful.
"People soon drift apart," said Mr Bankes, feeling, however, some sat-
isfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings and
the Ramsays. He had not drifted apart he thought, laying down his
spoon and wiping his clean-shaven lips punctiliously. But perhaps he
was rather unusual, he thought, in this; he never let himself get into a
groove. He had friends in all circles… Mrs Ramsay had to break off here
to tell the maid something about keeping food hot. That was why he pre-
ferred dining alone. All those interruptions annoyed him. Well, thought
William Bankes, preserving a demeanour of exquisite courtesy and
merely spreading the fingers of his left hand on the table-cloth as a
mechanic examines a tool beautifully polished and ready for use in an in-
terval of leisure, such are the sacrifices one's friends ask of one. It would
have hurt her if he had refused to come. But it was not worth it for him.
Looking at his hand he thought that if he had been alone dinner would
have been almost over now; he would have been free to work. Yes, he
thought, it is a terrible waste of time. The children were dropping in still.
"I wish one of you would run up to Roger's room," Mrs Ramsay was say-
ing. How trifling it all is, how boring it all is, he thought, compared with
the other thing— work. Here he sat drumming his fingers on the table-
cloth when he might have been—he took a flashing bird's-eye view of his
work. What a waste of time it all was to be sure! Yet, he thought, she is
one of my oldest friends. I am by way of being devoted to her. Yet now,
at this moment her presence meant absolutely nothing to him: her beauty
meant nothing to him; her sitting with her little boy at the window—
nothing, nothing. He wished only to be alone and to take up that book.
He felt uncomfortable; he felt treacherous, that he could sit by her side
and feel nothing for her. The truth was that he did not enjoy family life.
It was in this sort of state that one asked oneself, What does one live for?
Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race
to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species? Not so
very, he thought, looking at those rather untidy boys. His favourite,
Cam, was in bed, he supposed. Foolish questions, vain questions, ques-
tions one never asked if one was occupied. Is human life this? Is human
life that? One never had time to think about it. But here he was asking
himself that sort of question, because Mrs Ramsay was giving orders to
servants, and also because it had struck him, thinking how surprised
Mrs Ramsay was that Carrie Manning should still exist, that friendships,
even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart. He reproached

74
himself again. He was sitting beside Mrs Ramsay and he had nothing in
the world to say to her.
"I'm so sorry," said Mrs Ramsy, turning to him at last. He felt rigid and
barren, like a pair of boots that have been soaked and gone dry so that
you can hardly force your feet into them. Yet he must force his feet into
them. He must make himself talk. Unless he were very careful, she
would find out this treachery of his; that he did not care a straw for her,
and that would not be at all pleasant, he thought. So he bent his head
courteously in her direction.
"How you must detest dining in this bear garden," she said, making
use, as she did when she was distracted, of her social manner. So, when
there is a strife of tongues, at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain
unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad
French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker's
thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uni-
formity. Replying to her in the same language, Mr Bankes said, "No, not
at all," and Mr Tansley, who had no knowledge of this language, even
spoke thus in words of one syllable, at once suspected its insincerity.
They did talk nonsense, he thought, the Ramsays; and he pounced on
this fresh instance with joy, making a note which, one of these days, he
would read aloud, to one or two friends. There, in a society where one
could say what one liked he would sarcastically describe "staying with
the Ramsays" and what nonsense they talked. It was worth while doing
it once, he would say; but not again. The women bored one so, he would
say. Of course Ramsay had dished himself by marrying a beautiful wo-
man and having eight children. It would shape itself something like that,
but now, at this moment, sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside
him, nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in scraps and fragments.
He felt extremely, even physically, uncomfortable. He wanted somebody
to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that
he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried
to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were
talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion?
What did they know about the fishing industry?
Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in
an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire
to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh—that thin mist
which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the con-
versation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and

75
remembering how he sneered at women, "can't paint, can't write," why
should I help him to relieve himself?
There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may
be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever
her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man oppos-
ite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his van-
ity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she re-
flected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were
to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr
Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us
did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.
"You're not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily," said Mrs
Ramsay. "Remember poor Mr Langley; he had been round the world
dozens of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my
husband took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr Tansley?" she asked.
Mr Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it
descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instru-
ment as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life. But in that
one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a
fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely
himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley—a fact that
nobody there seemed to realise; but one of these days every single per-
son would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity
these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of
wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was
in him.
"Will you take me, Mr Tansley?" said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of
course, if Mrs Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, "I am drowning,
my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of
this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run
upon the rocks—indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this
minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will
snap"—when Mrs Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it,
of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce
the experiment—what happens if one is not nice to that young man
there—and be nice.
Judging the turn in her mood correctly—that she was friendly to him
now—he was relieved of his egotism, and told her how he had been
thrown out of a boat when he was a baby; how his father used to fish
him out with a boat-hook; that was how he had learnt to swim. One of

76
his uncles kept the light on some rock or other off the Scottish coast, he
said. He had been there with him in a storm. This was said loudly in a
pause. They had to listen to him when he said that he had been with his
uncle in a lighthouse in a storm. Ah, thought Lily Briscoe, as the conver-
sation took this auspicious turn, and she felt Mrs Ramsay's gratitude (for
Mrs Ramsay was free now to talk for a moment herself), ah, she thought,
but what haven't I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere.
She had done the usual trick—been nice. She would never know him.
He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she
thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between
men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere she thought.
Then her eye caught the salt cellar, which she had placed there to remind
her, and she remembered that next morning she would move the tree
further towards the middle, and her spirits rose so high at the thought of
painting tomorrow that she laughed out loud at what Mr Tansley was
saying. Let him talk all night if he liked it.
"But how long do they leave men on a Lighthouse?" she asked. He told
her. He was amazingly well informed. And as he was grateful, and as he
liked her, and as he was beginning to enjoy himself, so now, Mrs Ramsay
thought, she could return to that dream land, that unreal but fascinating
place, the Mannings' drawing-room at Marlow twenty years ago; where
one moved about without haste or anxiety, for there was no future to
worry about. She knew what had happened to them, what to her. It was
like reading a good book again, for she knew the end of that story, since
it had happened twenty years ago, and life, which shot down even from
this dining-room table in cascades, heaven knows where, was sealed up
there, and lay, like a lake, placidly between its banks. He said they had
built a billiard room—was it possible? Would William go on talking
about the Mannings? She wanted him to. But, no—for some reason he
was no longer in the mood. She tried. He did not respond. She could not
force him. She was disappointed.
"The children are disgraceful," she said, sighing. He said something
about punctuality being one of the minor virtues which we do not ac-
quire until later in life.
"If at all," said Mrs Ramsay merely to fill up space, thinking what an
old maid William was becoming. Conscious of his treachery, conscious
of her wish to talk about something more intimate, yet out of mood for it
at present, he felt come over him the disagreeableness of life, sitting
there, waiting. Perhaps the others were saying something interesting?
What were they saying?

77
 That the fishing season was bad; that the men were emigrating. They
were talking about wages and unemployment. The young man was ab-
using the government. William Bankes, thinking what a relief it was to
catch on to something of this sort when private life was disagreeable,
heard him say something about "one of the most scandalous acts of the
present government." Lily was listening; Mrs Ramsay was listening; they
were all listening. But already bored, Lily felt that something was lack-
ing; Mr Bankes felt that something was lacking. Pulling her shawl round
her Mrs Ramsay felt that something was lacking. All of them bending
themselves to listen thought, "Pray heaven that the inside of my mind
may not be exposed," for each thought, "The others are feeling this. They
are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen.
Whereas, I feel nothing at all." But perhaps, thought Mr Bankes, as he
looked at Mr Tansley, here is the man. One was always waiting for the
man. There was always a chance. At any moment the leader might arise;
the man of genius, in politics as in anything else. Probably he will be ex-
tremely disagreeable to us old fogies, thought Mr Bankes, doing his best
to make allowances, for he knew by some curious physical sensation, as
of nerves erect in his spine, that he was jealous, for himself partly, partly
more probably for his work, for his point of view, for his science; and
therefore he was not entirely open- minded or altogether fair, for Mr
Tansley seemed to be saying, You have wasted your lives. You are all of
you wrong. Poor old fogies, you're hopelessly behind the times. He
seemed to be rather cocksure, this young man; and his manners were
bad. But Mr Bankes bade himself observe, he had courage; he had abil-
ity; he was extremely well up in the facts. Probably, Mr Bankes thought,
as Tansley abused the government, there is a good deal in what he says.
"Tell me now… " he said. So they argued about politics, and Lily
looked at the leaf on the table-cloth; and Mrs Ramsay, leaving the argu-
ment entirely in the hands of the two men, wondered why she was so
bored by this talk, and wished, looking at her husband at the other end
of the table, that he would say something. One word, she said to herself.
For if he said a thing, it would make all the difference. He went to the
heart of things. He cared about fishermen and their wages. He could not
sleep for thinking of them. It was altogether different when he spoke;
one did not feel then, pray heaven you don't see how little I care, because
one did care. Then, realising that it was because she admired him so
much that she was waiting for him to speak, she felt as if somebody had
been praising her husband to her and their marriage, and she glowed all
over withiut realising that it was she herself who had praised him. She

78
looked at him thinking to find this in his face; he would be looking mag-
nificent… But not in the least! He was screwing his face up, he was
scowling and frowning, and flushing with anger. What on earth was it
about? she wondered. What could be the matter? Only that poor old
Augustus had asked for another plate of soup—that was all. It was un-
thinkable, it was detestable (so he signalled to her across the table) that
Augustus should be beginning his soup over again. He loathed people
eating when he had finished. She saw his anger fly like a pack of hounds
into his eyes, his brow, and she knew that in a moment something viol-
ent would explode, and then—thank goodness! she saw him clutch him-
self and clap a brake on the wheel, and the whole of his body seemed to
emit sparks but not words. He sat there scowling. He had said nothing,
he would have her observe. Let her give him the credit for that! But why
after all should poor Augustus not ask for another plate of soup? He had
merely touched Ellen's arm and said:
"Ellen, please, another plate of soup," and then Mr Ramsay scowled
like that.
And why not? Mrs Ramsay demanded. Surely they could let Augustus
have his soup if he wanted it. He hated people wallowing in food, Mr
Ramsay frowned at her. He hated everything dragging on for hours like
this. But he had controlled himself, Mr Ramsay would have her observe,
disgusting though the sight was. But why show it so plainly, Mrs Ram-
say demanded (they looked at each other down the long table sending
these questions and answers across, each knowing exactly what the other
felt). Everybody could see, Mrs Ramsay thought. There was Rose gazing
at her father, there was Roger gazing at his father; both would be off in
spasms of laughter in another second, she knew, and so she said
promptly (indeed it was time):
"Light the candles," and they jumped up instantly and went and
fumbled at the sideboard.
Why could he never conceal his feelings? Mrs Ramsay wondered, and
she wondered if Augustus Carmichael had noticed. Perhaps he had; per-
haps he had not. She could not help respecting the composure with
which he sat there, drinking his soup. If he wanted soup, he asked for
soup. Whether people laughed at him or were angry with him he was
the same. He did not like her, she knew that; but partly for that very
reason she respected him, and looking at him, drinking soup, very large
and calm in the failing light, and monumental, and contemplative, she
wondered what he did feel then, and why he was always content and
dignified; and she thought how devoted he was to Andrew, and would

79
call him into his room, and Andrew said, "show him things." And there
he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his po-
etry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, and then he clapped
his paws together when he had found the word, and her husband said,
"Poor old Augustus—he's a true poet," which was high praise from her
husband.
Now eight candles were stood down the table, and after the first stoop
the flames stood upright and drew with them into visibility the long
table entire, and in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What
had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered, for Rose's arrangement of
the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made
her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's
banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of
Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lol-
loping red and gold… Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed
possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could
take one's staff and climb hills, she thought, and go down into valleys,
and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she
saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit,
plunged in, broke off a bloom there, a tassel here, and returned, after
feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers.
But looking together united them.
Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table
were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not
been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now
shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of
the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room,
seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which
things waved and vanished, waterily.
Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really
happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a
hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out
there. Mrs Ramsay, who had been uneasy, waiting for Paul and Minta to
come in, and unable, she felt, to settle to things, now felt her uneasiness
changed to expectation. For now they must come, and Lily Briscoe, try-
ing to analyse the cause of the sudden exhilaration, compared it with
that moment on the tennis lawn, when solidity suddenly vanished, and
such vast spaces lay between them; and now the same effect was got by
the many candles in the sparely furnished room, and the uncurtained
windows, and the bright mask-like look of faces seen by candlelight.

80
Some weight was taken off them; anything might happen, she felt. They
must come now, Mrs Ramsay thought, looking at the door, and at that
instant, Minta Doyle, Paul Rayley, and a maid carrying a great dish in
her hands came in together. They were awfully late; they were horribly
late, Minta said, as they found their way to different ends of the table.
"I lost my brooch—my grandmother's brooch," said Minta with a
sound of lamentation in her voice, and a suffusion in her large brown
eyes, looking down, looking up, as she sat by Mr Ramsay, which roused
his chivalry so that he bantered her.
How could she be such a goose, he asked, as to scramble about the
rocks in jewels?
She was by way of being terrified of him—he was so fearfully clever,
and the first night when she had sat by him, and he talked about George
Eliot, she had been really frightened, for she had left the third volume of
MIDDLEMARCH in the train and she never knew what happened in the
end; but afterwards she got on perfectly, and made herself out even
more ignorant than she was, because he liked telling her she was a fool.
And so tonight, directly he laughed at her, she was not frightened.
Besides, she knew, directly she came into the room that the miracle had
happened; she wore her golden haze. Sometimes she had it; sometimes
not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she
came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man
looked at her. Yes, tonight she had it, tremendously; she knew that by
the way Mr Ramsay told her not to be a fool. She sat beside him, smiling.
It must have happened then, thought Mrs Ramsay; they are engaged.
And for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again—
jealousy. For he, her husband, felt it too—Minta's glow; he liked these
girls, these golden-reddish girls, with something flying, something a
little wild and harum-scarum about them, who didn't "scrape their hair
off," weren't, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe, "skimpy". There was
some quality which she herself had not, some lustre, some richness,
which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls
like Minta. They might cut his hair from him, plait him watch-chains, or
interrupt him at his work, hailing him (she heard them), "Come along,
Mr Ramsay; it's our turn to beat them now," and out he came to play
tennis.
But indeed she was not jealous, only, now and then, when she made
herself look in her glass, a little resentful that she had grown old, per-
haps, by her own fault. (The bill for the greenhouse and all the rest of it.)
She was grateful to them for laughing at him. ("How many pipes have

81
you smoked today, Mr Ramsay?" and so on), till he seemed a young
man; a man very attractive to women, not burdened, not weighed down
with the greatness of his labours and the sorrows of the world and his
fame or his failure, but again as she had first known him, gaunt but gal-
lant; helping her out of a boat, she remembered; with delightful ways,
like that (she looked at him, and he looked astonishingly young, teasing
Minta). For herself—"Put it down there," she said, helping the Swiss girl
to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the BOEUF
EN DAUBE—for her own part, she liked her boobies. Paul must sit by
her. She had kept a place for him. Really, she sometimes thought she
liked the boobies best. They did not bother one with their dissertations.
How much they missed, after all, these very clever men! How dried up
they did become, to be sure. There was something, she thought as he sat
down, very charming about Paul. His manners were delightful to her,
and his sharp cut nose and his bright blue eyes. He was so considerate.
Would he tell her—now that they were all talking again—what had
happened?
"We went back to look for Minta's brooch," he said, sitting down by
her. "We"—that was enough. She knew from the effort, the rise in his
voice to surmount a difficult word that it was the first time he had said
"we." "We did this, we did that." They'll say that all their lives, she
thought, and an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice rose from the
great brown dish as Marthe, with a little flourish, took the cover off. The
cook had spent three days over that dish. And she must take great care,
Mrs Ramsay thought, diving into the soft mass, to choose a specially
tender piece for William Bankes. And she peered into the dish, with its
shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its
bay leaves and its wine, and thought, This will celebrate the occasion—a
curious sense rising in her, at once freakish and tender, of celebrating a
festival, as if two emotions were called up in her, one profound—for
what could be more serious than the love of man for woman, what more
commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death;
at the same time these lovers, these people entering into illusion glitter-
ing eyed, must be danced round with mockery, decorated with garlands.
"It is a triumph," said Mr Bankes, laying his knife down for a moment.
He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly
cooked. How did she manage these things in the depths of the country?
he asked her. She was a wonderful woman. All his love, all his rever-
ence, had returned; and she knew it.

82
 "It is a French recipe of my grandmother's," said Mrs Ramsay, speak-
ing with a ring of great pleasure in her voice. Of course it was French.
What passes for cookery in England is an abomination (they agreed). It is
putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is
cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables. "In which," said Mr Bankes,
"all the virtue of the vegetable is contained." And the waste, said Mrs
Ramsay. A whole French family could live on what an English cook
throws away. Spurred on by her sense that William's affection had come
back to her, and that everything was all right again, and that her sus-
pense was over, and that now she was free both to triumph and to mock,
she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily thought, How childlike, how ab-
surd she was, sitting up there with all her beauty opened again in her,
talking about the skins of vegetables. There was something frightening
about her. She was irresistible. Always she got her own way in the end,
Lily thought. Now she had brought this off—Paul and Minta, one might
suppose, were engaged. Mr Bankes was dining here. She put a spell on
them all, by wishing, so simply, so directly, and Lily contrasted that
abundance with her own poverty of spirit, and supposed that it was
partly that belief (for her face was all lit up—without looking young, she
looked radiant) in this strange, this terrifying thing, which made Paul
Rayley, sitting at her side, all of a tremor, yet abstract, absorbed, silent.
Mrs Ramsay, Lily felt, as she talked about the skins of vegetables, exalted
that, worshipped that; held her hands over it to warm them, to protect it,
and yet, having brought it all about, somehow laughed, led her victims,
Lily felt, to the altar. It came over her too now—the emotion, the vibra-
tion, of love. How inconspicuous she felt herself by Paul's side! He,
glowing, burning; she, aloof, satirical; he, bound for adventure; she,
moored to the shore; he, launched, incautious; she solitary, left out—and,
ready to implore a share, if it were a disaster, in his disaster, she said
shyly:
"When did Minta lose her brooch?"
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by
dreams. He shook his head. "On the beach," he said.
"I'm going to find it," he said, "I'm getting up early." This being kept
secret from Minta, he lowered his voice, and turned his eyes to where
she sat, laughing, beside Mr Ramsay.
Lily wanted to protest violently and outrageously her desire to help
him, envisaging how in the dawn on the beach she would be the one to
pounce on the brooch half-hidden by some stone, and thus herself be in-
cluded among the sailors and adventurers. But what did he reply to her

83
offer? She actually said with an emotion that she seldom let appear, "Let
me come with you," and he laughed. He meant yes or no— either per-
haps. But it was not his meaning—it was the odd chuckle he gave, as if
he had said, Throw yourself over the cliff if you like, I don't care. He
turned on her cheek the heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its unscrupu-
losity. It scorched her, and Lily, looking at Minta, being charming to Mr
Ramsay at the other end of the table, flinched for her exposed to these
fangs, and was thankful. For at any rate, she said to herself, catching
sight of the salt cellar on the pattern, she need not marry, thank Heaven:
she need not undergo that degradation. She was saved from that dilu-
tion. She would move the tree rather more to the middle.
Such was the complexity of things. For what happened to her, espe-
cially staying with the Ramsays, was to be made to feel violently two op-
posite things at the same time; that's what you feel, was one; that's what I
feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now. It
is so beautiful, so exciting, this love, that I tremble on the verge of it, and
offer, quite out of my own habit, to look for a brooch on a beach; also it is
the stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions, and turns a nice
young man with a profile like a gem's (Paul's was exquisite) into a bully
with a crowbar (he was swaggering, he was insolent) in the Mile End
Road. Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been
sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people
out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this—love; while the
women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling,
This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and in-
humane than this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well
then? she asked, somehow expecting the others to go on with the argu-
ment, as if in an argument like this one threw one's own little bolt which
fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on. So she listened
again to what they were saying in case they should throw any light upon
the question of love.
"Then," said Mr Bankes, "there is that liquid the English call coffee."
"Oh, coffee!" said Mrs Ramsay. But it was much rather a question (she
was thoroughly roused, Lily could see, and talked very emphatically) of
real butter and clean milk. Speaking with warmth and eloquence, she de-
scribed the iniquity of the English dairy system, and in what state milk
was delivered at the door, and was about to prove her charges, for she
had gone into the matter, when all round the table, beginning with
Andrew in the middle, like a fire leaping from tuft to tuft of furze, her
children laughed; her husband laughed; she was laughed at, fire-

84
encircled, and forced to veil her crest, dismount her batteries, and only
retaliate by displaying the raillery and ridicule of the table to Mr Bankes
as an example of what one suffered if one attacked the prejudices of the
British Public.
Purposely, however, for she had it on her mind that Lily, who had
helped her with Mr Tansley, was out of things, she exempted her from
the rest; said "Lily anyhow agrees with me," and so drew her in, a little
fluttered, a little startled. (For she was thinking about love.) They were
both out of things, Mrs Ramsay had been thinking, both Lily and Charles
Tansley. Both suffered from the glow of the other two. He, it was clear,
felt himself utterly in the cold; no woman would look at him with Paul
Rayley in the room. Poor fellow! Still, he had his dissertation, the influ-
ence of somebody upon something: he could take care of himself. With
Lily it was different. She faded, under Minta's glow; became more incon-
spicuous than ever, in her little grey dress with her little puckered face
and her little Chinese eyes. Everything about her was so small. Yet,
thought Mrs Ramsay, comparing her with Minta, as she claimed her help
(for Lily should bear her out she talked no more about her dairies than
her husband did about his boots—he would talk by the hour about his
boots) of the two, Lily at forty will be the better. There was in Lily a
thread of something; a flare of something; something of her own which
Mrs Ramsay liked very much indeed, but no man would, she feared. Ob-
viously, not, unless it were a much older man, like William Bankes. But
then he cared, well, Mrs Ramsay sometimes thought that he cared, since
his wife's death, perhaps for her. He was not "in love" of course; it was
one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many. Oh, but
nonsense, she thought; William must marry Lily. They have so many
things in common. Lily is so fond of flowers. They are both cold and
aloof and rather self-sufficing. She must arrange for them to take a long
walk together.
Foolishly, she had set them opposite each other. That could be
remedied tomorrow. If it were fine, they should go for a picnic.
Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this
cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while
they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she
hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy
which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, sol-
emnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there,
from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this pro-
found stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece

85
more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now
for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising up-
wards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could
be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully help-
ing Mr Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already
felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a co-
herence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from
change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of re-
flected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a
ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today,
already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is
made that endures.
"Yes," she assured William Bankes, "there is plenty for everybody."
"Andrew," she said, "hold your plate lower, or I shall spill it." (The
BOEUF EN DAUBE was a perfect triumph.) Here, she felt, putting the
spoon down, where one could move or rest; could wait now (they were
all helped) listening; could then, like a hawk which lapses suddenly from
its high station, flaunt and sink on laughter easily, resting her whole
weight upon what at the other end of the table her husband was saying
about the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three. That
was the number, it seemed, on his watch.
What did it all mean? To this day she had no notion. A square root?
What was that? Her sons knew. She leant on them; on cubes and square
roots; that was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Ma-
dame de Stael; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of
land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey's Memoirs: she let it uphold
her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence,
which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders
spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world, so that she could
trust herself to it utterly, even shut her eyes, or flicker them for a mo-
ment, as a child staring up from its pillow winks at the myriad layers of
the leaves of a tree. Then she woke up. It was still being fabricated. Willi-
am Bankes was praising the Waverly novels.
He read one of them every six months, he said. And why should that
make Charles Tansley angry? He rushed in (all, thought Mrs Ramsay,
because Prue will not be nice to him) and denounced the Waverly novels
when he knew nothing about it, nothing about it whatsoever, Mrs Ram-
say thought, observing him rather than listening to what he said. She
could see how it was from his manner—he wanted to assert himself, and
so it would always be with him till he got his Professorship or married

86
his wife, and so need not be always saying, "I—I—I." For that was what
his criticism of poor Sir Walter, or perhaps it was Jane Austen, amounted
to. "I—I—I." He was thinking of himself and the impression he was mak-
ing, as she could tell by the sound of his voice, and his emphasis and his
uneasiness. Success would be good for him. At any rate they were off
again. Now she need not listen. It could not last, she knew, but at the
moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table
unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings,
without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the
reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent
trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them;
but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like
the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple
and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the
whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting
and separating one thing from another; she would be saying she liked
the Waverly novels or had not read them; she would be urging herself
forward; now she said nothing. For the moment, she hung suspended.
"Ah, but how long do you think it'll last?" said somebody. It was as if
she had antennae trembling out from her, which, intercepting certain
sentences, forced them upon her attention. This was one of them. She
scented danger for her husband. A question like that would lead, almost
certainly, to something being said which reminded him of his own fail-
ure. How long would he be read—he would think at once. William
Bankes (who was entirely free from all such vanity) laughed, and said he
attached no importance to changes in fashion. Who could tell what was
going to last—in literature or indeed in anything else?
"Let us enjoy what we do enjoy," he said. His integrity seemed to Mrs
Ramsay quite admirable. He never seemed for a moment to think, But
how does this affect me? But then if you had the other temperament,
which must have praise, which must have encouragement, naturally you
began (and she knew that Mr Ramsay was beginning) to be uneasy; to
want somebody to say, Oh, but your work will last, Mr Ramsay, or
something like that. He showed his uneasiness quite clearly now by say-
ing, with some irritation, that, anyhow, Scott (or was it Shakespeare ?)
would last him his lifetime. He said it irritably. Everybody, she thought,
felt a little uncomfortable, without knowing why. Then Minta Doyle,
whose instinct was fine, said bluffly, absurdly, that she did not believe
that any one really enjoyed reading Shakespeare. Mr Ramsay said grimly
(but his mind was turned away again) that very few people liked it as

87
much as they said they did. But, he added, there is considerable merit in
some of the plays nevertheless, and Mrs Ramsay saw that it would be all
right for the moment anyhow; he would laugh at Minta, and she, Mrs
Ramsay saw, realising his extreme anxiety about himself, would, in her
own way, see that he was taken care of, and praise him, somehow or oth-
er. But she wished it was not necessary: perhaps it was her fault that it
was necessary. Anyhow, she was free now to listen to what Paul Rayley
was trying to say about books one had read as a boy. They lasted, he
said. He had read some of Tolstoi at school. There was one he always re-
membered, but he had forgotten the name. Russian names were im-
possible, said Mrs Ramsay. "Vronsky," said Paul. He remembered that
because he always thought it such a good name for a villain. "Vronsky,"
said Mrs Ramsay; "Oh, ANNA KARENINA," but that did not take them
very far; books were not in their line. No, Charles Tansley would put
them both right in a second about books, but it was all so mixed up with,
Am I saying the right thing? Am I making a good impression? that, after
all, one knew more about him than about Tolstoi, whereas, what Paul
said was about the thing, simply, not himself, nothing else. Like all stu-
pid people, he had a kind of modesty too, a consideration for what you
were feeling, which, once in a way at least, she found attractive. Now he
was thinking, not about himself, or about Tolstoi, but whether she was
cold, whether she felt a draught, whether she would like a pear.
No, she said, she did not want a pear. Indeed she had been keeping
guard over the dish of fruit (without realising it) jealously, hoping that
nobody would touch it. Her eyes had been going in and out among the
curves and shadows of the fruit, among the rich purples of the lowland
grapes, then over the horny ridge of the shell, putting a yellow against a
purple, a curved shape against a round shape, without knowing why she
did it, or why, every time she did it, she felt more and more serene; until,
oh, what a pity that they should do it—a hand reached out, took a pear,
and spoilt the whole thing. In sympathy she looked at Rose. She looked
at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one's child
should do that!
How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose,
Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on,
she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was something quite
apart from everything else, something they were hoarding up to laugh
over in their own room. It was not about their father, she hoped. No, she
thought not. What was it, she wondered, sadly rather, for it seemed to
her that they would laugh when she was not there. There was all that

88
hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask-like faces, for they did not
join in easily; they were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set
apart from the grown-up people. But when she looked at Prue tonight,
she saw that this was not now quite true of her. She was just beginning,
just moving, just descending. The faintest light was on her face, as if the
glow of Minta opposite, some excitement, some anticipation of happi-
ness was reflected in her, as if the sun of the love of men and women
rose over the rim of the table-cloth, and without knowing what it was
she bent towards it and greeted it. She kept looking at Minta, shyly, yet
curiously, so that Mrs Ramsay looked from one to the other and said,
speaking to Prue in her own mind, You will be as happy as she is one of
these days. You will be much happier, she added, because you are my
daughter, she meant; her own daughter must be happier than other
people's daughters. But dinner was over. It was time to go. They were
only playing with things on their plates. She would wait until they had
done laughing at some story her husband was telling. He was having a
joke with Minta about a bet. Then she would get up.
She liked Charles Tansley, she thought, suddenly; she liked his laugh.
She liked him for being so angry with Paul and Minta. She liked his awk-
wardness. There was a lot in that young man after all. And Lily, she
thought, putting her napkin beside her plate, she always has some joke
of her own. One need never bother about Lily. She waited. She tucked
her napkin under the edge of her plate. Well, were they done now? No.
That story had led to another story. Her husband was in great spirits to-
night, and wishing, she supposed, to make it all right with old Augustus
after that scene about the soup, had drawn him in— they were telling
stories about some one they had both known at college. She looked at the
window in which the candle flames burnt brighter now that the panes
were black, and looking at that outside the voices came to her very
strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral, for she did
not listen to the words. The sudden bursts of laughter and then one voice
(Minta's) speaking alone, reminded her of men and boys crying out the
Latin words of a service in some Roman Catholic cathedral. She waited.
Her husband spoke. He was repeating something, and she knew it was
poetry from the rhythm and the ring of exultation, and melancholy in his
voice:
Come out and climb the garden path, Luriana Lurilee. The China rose
is all abloom and buzzing with the yellow bee.

89
 The words (she was looking at the window) sounded as if they were
floating like flowers on water out there, cut off from them all, as if no one
had said them, but they had come into existence of themselves.
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be Are full of trees
and changing leaves.
She did not know what they meant, but, like music, the words seemed
to be spoken by her own voice, outside her self, saying quite easily and
naturally what had been in her mind the whole evening while she said
different things. She knew, without looking round, that every one at the
table was listening to the voice saying:
I wonder if it seems to you, Luriana, Lurilee
with the same sort of relief and pleasure that she had, as if this were, at
last, the natural thing to say, this were their own voice speaking.
But the voice had stopped. She looked round. She made herself get up.
Augustus Carmichael had risen and, holding his table napkin so that it
looked like a long white robe he stood chanting:
To see the Kings go riding by Over lawn and daisy lea With their palm
leaves and cedar Luriana, Lurilee,
and as she passed him, he turned slightly towards her repeating the
last words:
Luriana, Lurilee
and bowed to her as if he did her homage. Without knowing why, she
felt that he liked her better than he ever had done before; and with a feel-
ing of relief and gratitude she returned his bow and passed through the
door which he held open for her.
It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. With her foot
on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was van-
ishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm
and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become,
she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.

90
Chapter 18
As usual, Lily thought. There was always something that had to be done
at that precise moment, something that Mrs Ramsay had decided for
reasons of her own to do instantly, it might be with every one standing
about making jokes, as now, not being able to decide whether they were
going into the smoking-room, into the drawing-room, up to the attics.
Then one saw Mrs Ramsay in the midst of this hubbub standing there
with Minta's arm in hers, bethink her, "Yes, it is time for that now," and
so make off at once with an air of secrecy to do something alone. And
directly she went a sort of disintegration set in; they wavered about,
went different ways, Mr Bankes took Charles Tansley by the arm and
went off to finish on the terrace the discussion they had begun at dinner
about politics, thus giving a turn to the whole poise of the evening, mak-
ing the weight fall in a different direction, as if, Lily thought, seeing them
go, and hearing a word or two about the policy of the Labour Party, they
had gone up on to the bridge of the ship and were taking their bearings;
the change from poetry to politics struck her like that; so Mr Bankes and
Charles Mrs Ramsay going upstairs in the lamplight alone. Where, Lily
wondered, was she going so quickly?
Not that she did in fact run or hurry; she went indeed rather slowly.
She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chat-
ter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach
it; separate it off; clean it of all the emotions and odds and ends of things,
and so hold it before her, and bring it to the tribunal where, ranged
about in conclave, sat the judges she had set up to decide these things. Is
it good, is it bad, is it right or wrong? Where are we all going to? and so
on. So she righted herself after the shock of the event, and quite uncon-
sciously and incongruously, used the branches of the elm trees outside to
help her to stabilise her position. Her world was changing: they were
still. The event had given her a sense of movement. All must be in order.
She must get that right and that right, she thought, insensibly approving
of the dignity of the trees' stillness, and now again of the superb upward
rise (like the beak of a ship up a wave) of the elm branches as the wind

91
raised them. For it was windy (she stood a moment to look out). It was
windy, so that the leaves now and then brushed open a star, and the
stars themselves seemed to be shaking and darting light and trying to
flash out between the edges of the leaves. Yes, that was done then, ac-
complished; and as with all things done, became solemn. Now one
thought of it, cleared of chatter and emotion, it seemed always to have
been, only was shown now and so being shown, struck everything into
stability. They would, she thought, going on again, however long they
lived, come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to
her too. It flattered her, where she was most susceptible of flattery, to
think how, wound about in their hearts, however long they lived she
would be woven; and this, and this, and this, she thought, going up-
stairs, laughing, but affectionately, at the sofa on the landing (her
mother's); at the rocking-chair (her father's); at the map of the Hebrides.
All that would be revived again in the lives of Paul and Minta; "the Ray-
leys"—she tried the new name over; and she felt, with her hand on the
nursery door, that community of feeling with other people which emo-
tion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically
(the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and
chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and
Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.
She turned the handle, firmly, lest it should squeak, and went in, purs-
ing her lips slightly, as if to remind herself that she must not speak
aloud. But directly she came in she saw, with annoyance, that the pre-
caution was not needed. The children were not asleep. It was most an-
noying. Mildred should be more careful. There was James wide awake
and Cam sitting bolt upright, and Mildred out of bed in her bare feet,
and it was almost eleven and they were all talking. What was the matter?
It was that horrid skull again. She had told Mildred to move it, but Mil-
dred, of course, had forgotten, and now there was Cam wide awake, and
James wide awake quarreling when they ought to have been asleep
hours ago. What had possessed Edward to send them this horrid skull?
She had been so foolish as to let them nail it up there. It was nailed fast,
Mildred said, and Cam couldn't go to sleep with it in the room, and
James screamed if she touched it.
Then Cam must go to sleep (it had great horns said Cam)—must go to
sleep and dream of lovely palaces, said Mrs Ramsay, sitting down on the
bed by her side. She could see the horns, Cam said, all over the room. It
was true. Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep
without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.

92
 "But think, Cam, it's only an old pig," said Mrs Ramsay, "a nice black
pig like the pigs at the farm." But Cam thought it was a horrid thing,
branching at her all over the room.
"Well then," said Mrs Ramsay, "we will cover it up," and they all
watched her go to the chest of drawers, and open the little drawers
quickly one after another, and not seeing anything that would do, she
quickly took her own shawl off and wound it round the skull, round and
round and round, and then she came back to Cam and laid her head al-
most flat on the pillow beside Cam's and said how lovely it looked now;
how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird's nest; it was like a beauti-
ful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and
bells ringing and birds singing and little goats and antelopes and… She
could see the words echoing as she spoke them rhythmically in Cam's
mind, and Cam was repeating after her how it was like a mountain, a
bird's nest, a garden, and there were little antelopes, and her eyes were
opening and shutting, and Mrs Ramsay went on speaking still more
monotonously, and more rhythmically and more nonsensically, how she
must shut her eyes and go to sleep and dream of mountains and valleys
and stars falling and parrots and antelopes and gardens, and everything
lovely, she said, raising her head very slowly and speaking more and
more mechanically, until she sat upright and saw that Cam was asleep.
Now, she whispered, crossing over to his bed, James must go to sleep
too, for see, she said, the boar's skull was still there; they had not touched
it; they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt. He
made sure that the skull was still there under the shawl. But he wanted
to ask her something more. Would they go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?
No, not tomorrow, she said, but soon, she promised him; the next fine
day. He was very good. He lay down. She covered him up. But he would
never forget, she knew, and she felt angry with Charles Tansley, with her
husband, and with herself, for she had raised his hopes. Then feeling for
her shawl and remembering that she had wrapped it round the boar's
skull, she got up, and pulled the window down another inch or two, and
heard the wind, and got a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night
air and murmured good night to Mildred and left the room and let the
tongue of the door slowly lengthen in the lock and went out.
She hoped he would not bang his books on the floor above their heads,
she thought, still thinking how annoying Charles Tansley was. For
neither of them slept well; they were excitable children, and since he said
things like that about the Lighthouse, it seemed to her likely that he
would knock a pile of books over, just as they were going to sleep,

93
clumsily sweeping them off the table with his elbow. For she supposed
that he had gone upstairs to work. Yet he looked so desolate; yet she
would feel relieved when he went; yet she would see that he was better
treated tomorrow; yet he was admirable with her husband; yet his man-
ners certainly wanted improving; yet she liked his laugh—thinking this,
as she came downstairs, she noticed that she could now see the moon it-
self through the staircase window—the yellow harvest moon— and
turned, and they saw her, standing above them on the stairs.
"That's my mother," thought Prue. Yes; Minta should look at her; Paul
Rayley should look at her. That is the thing itself, she felt, as if there were
only one person like that in the world; her mother. And, from having
been quite grown up, a moment before, talking with the others, she be-
came a child again, and what they had been doing was a game, and
would her mother sanction their game, or condemn it, she wondered.
And thinking what a chance it was for Minta and Paul and Lily to see
her, and feeling what an extraordinary stroke of fortune it was for her, to
have her, and how she would never grow up and never leave home, she
said, like a child, "We thought of going down to the beach to watch the
waves."
Instantly, for no reason at all, Mrs Ramsay became like a girl of
twenty, full of gaiety. A mood of revelry suddenly took possession of
her. Of course they must go; of course they must go, she cried, laughing;
and running down the last three or four steps quickly, she began turning
from one to the other and laughing and drawing Minta's wrap round her
and saying she only wished she could come too, and would they be very
late, and had any of them got a watch?
"Yes, Paul has," said Minta. Paul slipped a beautiful gold watch out of
a little wash-leather case to show her. And as he held it in the palm of his
hand before her, he felt, "She knows all about it. I need not say any-
thing." He was saying to her as he showed her the watch, "I've done it,
Mrs Ramsay. I owe it all to you." And seeing the gold watch lying in his
hand, Mrs Ramsay felt, How extraordinarily lucky Minta is! She is mar-
rying a man who has a gold watch in a wash- leather bag!
"How I wish I could come with you!" she cried. But she was withheld
by something so strong that she never even thought of asking herself
what it was. Of course it was impossible for her to go with them. But she
would have liked to go, had it not been for the other thing, and tickled
by the absurdity of her thought (how lucky to marry a man with a wash-
leather bag for his watch) she went with a smile on her lips into the other
room, where her husband sat reading.

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Chapter 19
Of course, she said to herself, coming into the room, she had to come
here to get something she wanted. First she wanted to sit down in a par-
ticular chair under a particular lamp. But she wanted something more,
though she did not know, could not think what it was that she wanted.
She looked at her husband (taking up her stocking and beginning to
knit), and saw that he did not want to be interrupted— that was clear.
He was reading something that moved him very much. He was half
smiling and then she knew he was controlling his emotion. He was toss-
ing the pages over. He was acting it—perhaps he was thinking himself
the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one
of old Sir Walter's she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the
light fell on her knitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she
looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor
above), had been saying that people don't read Scott any more. Then her
husband thought, "That's what they'll say of me;" so he went and got one
of those books. And if he came to the conclusion "That's true" what
Charles Tansley said, he would accept it about Scott. (She could see that
he was weighing, considering, putting this with that as he read.) But not
about himself. He was always uneasy about himself. That troubled her.
He would always be worrying about his own books—will they be read,
are they good, why aren't they better, what do people think of me? Not
liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner
why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and
books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she
twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with
steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a
tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze
falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.
It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book,
fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way
with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking
quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in

95
him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a
straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the
hall when the others were talking, There is something I
want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper
without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she
waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they
had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the
honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically,
and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue,
one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their
perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed;
so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book.
And all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves,
she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened
the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so,
she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up
under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or
this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all.
Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners
she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way
and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from
one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her
husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did
not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something
seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the
power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him
slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say
anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It
filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of
the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people
ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and
so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't
exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if
thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if
not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for
straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed
creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved
of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke

96
back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall
and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but
not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English
novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as
the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor
Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best)
and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.
Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the
chapter. He felt that he had been arguing with somebody, and had got
the better of him. They could not improve upon that, whatever they
might say; and his own position became more secure. The lovers were
fiddlesticks, he thought, collecting it all in his mind again. That's fiddle-
sticks, that's first-rate, he thought, putting one thing beside another. But
he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the
thing. He had to keep his judgement in suspense. So he returned to the
other thought—if young men did not care for this, naturally they did not
care for him either. One ought not to complain, thought Mr Ramsay, try-
ing to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young men did not ad-
mire him. But he was determined; he would not bother her again. Here
he looked at her reading. She looked very peaceful, reading. He liked to
think that every one had taken themselves off and that he and she were
alone. The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he
thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the
French novel.
Mrs Ramsay raised her head and like a person in a light sleep seemed
to say that if he wanted her to wake she would, she really would, but
otherwise, might she go on sleeping, just a little longer, just a little
longer? She was climbing up those branches, this way and that, laying
hands on one flower and then another.
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,
she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on
to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the
day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there
it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reason-
able, clear and complete, here—the sonnet.
But she was becoming conscious of her husband looking at her. He
was smiling at her, quizzically, as if he were ridiculing her gently for be-
ing asleep in broad daylight, but at the same time he was thinking, Go on
reading. You don't look sad now, he thought. And he wondered what
she was reading, and exaggerated her ignorance, her simplicity, for he

97
liked to think that she was not clever, not book-learned at all. He
wondered if she understood what she was reading. Probably not, he
thought. She was astonishingly beautiful. Her beauty seemed to him, if
that were possible, to increase
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play,
she finished.
"Well?" she said, echoing his smile dreamily, looking up from her
book.
As with your shadow I with these did play,
she murmured, putting the book on the table.
What had happened, she wondered, as she took up her knitting, since
she had seen him alone? She remembered dressing, and seeing the
moon; Andrew holding his plate too high at dinner; being depressed by
something William had said; the birds in the trees; the sofa on the land-
ing; the children being awake; Charles Tansley waking them with his
books falling—oh, no, that she had invented; and Paul having a wash-
leather case for his watch. Which should she tell him about?
"They're engaged," she said, beginning to knit, "Paul and Minta."
"So I guessed," he said. There was nothing very much to be said about
it. Her mind was still going up and down, up and down with the poetry;
he was still feeling very vigorous, very forthright, after reading about
Steenie's funeral. So they sat silent. Then she became aware that she
wanted him to say something.
Anything, anything, she thought, going on with her knitting. Anything
will do.
"How nice it would be to marry a man with a wash-leather bag for his
watch," she said, for that was the sort of joke they had together.
He snorted. He felt about this engagement as he always felt about any
engagement; the girl is much too good for that young man. Slowly it
came into her head, why is it then that one wants people to marry? What
was the value, the meaning of things? (Every word they said now would
be true.) Do say something, she thought, wishing only to hear his voice.
For the shadow, the thing folding them in was beginning, she felt, to
close round her again. Say anything, she begged, looking at him, as if for
help.
He was silent, swinging the compass on his watch-chain to and fro,
and thinking of Scott's novels and Balzac's novels. But through the
crepuscular walls of their intimacy, for they were drawing together, in-
voluntarily, coming side by side, quite close, she could feel his mind like

98
a raised hand shadowing her mind; and he was beginning, now that her
thoughts took a turn he disliked—towards this "pessimism" as he called
it—to fidget, though he said nothing, raising his hand to his forehead,
twisting a lock of hair, letting it fall again.
"You won't finish that stocking tonight," he said, pointing to her stock-
ing. That was what she wanted—the asperity in his voice reproving her.
If he says it's wrong to be pessimistic probably it is wrong, she thought;
the marriage will turn out all right.
"No," she said, flattening the stocking out upon her knee, "I shan't fin-
ish it."
And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her, but that his
look had changed. He wanted something—wanted the thing she always
found it so difficult to give him; wanted her to tell him that she loved
him. And that, no, she could not do. He found talking so much easier
than she did. He could say things—she never could. So naturally it was
always he that said the things, and then for some reason he would mind
this suddenly, and would reproach her. A heartless woman he called
her; she never told him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not
so. It was only that she never could say what she felt. Was there no
crumb on his coat? Nothing she could do for him? Getting up, she stood
at the window with the reddish-brown stocking in her hands, partly to
turn away from him, partly because she remembered how beautiful it of-
ten is—the sea at night. But she knew that he had turned his head as she
turned; he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are
more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful. Will you
not tell me just for once that you love me? He was thinking that, for he
was roused, what with Minta and his book, and its being the end of the
day and their having quarrelled about going to the Lighthouse. But she
could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching
her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and
looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though
she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew, that she loved him.
He could not deny it. And smiling she looked out of the window and
said (thinking to herself, Nothing on earth can equal this happiness)—
"Yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You won't be able
to go." And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. She
had not said it: yet he knew.

99
 Part 2
Time Passes

100
Chapter 1
"Well, we must wait for the future to show," said Mr Bankes, coming in
from the terrace.
"It's almost too dark to see," said Andrew, coming up from the beach.
"One can hardly tell which is the sea and which is the land," said Prue.
"Do we leave that light burning?" said Lily as they took their coats off
indoors.
"No," said Prue, "not if every one's in."
"Andrew," she called back, "just put out the light in the hall."
One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr Carmi-
chael, who liked to lie awake a little reading Virgil, kept his candle burn-
ing rather longer than the rest.

101
Chapter 2
So with the lamps all put out, the moon sunk, and a thin rain drumming
on the roof a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it
seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness which, creep-
ing in at keyholes and crevices, stole round window blinds, came into
bedrooms, swallowed up here a jug and basin, there a bowl of red and
yellow dahlias, there the sharp edges and firm bulk of a chest of drawers.
Not only was furniture confounded; there was scarcely anything left of
body or mind by which one could say, "This is he" or "This is she." Some-
times a hand was raised as if to clutch something or ward off something,
or somebody groaned, or somebody laughed aloud as if sharing a joke
with nothingness.
Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the
staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened
woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house
was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors. Al-
most one might imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room ques-
tioning and wondering, toying with the flap of hanging wall-paper, ask-
ing, would it hang much longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly
brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yel-
low roses on the wall-paper whether they would fade, and questioning
(gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the
wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to
them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would
they endure?
So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair
and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Light-
house even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs moun-
ted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they
must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is
steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs
that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor
destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light

102
fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on
the shut eyes, and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments
wearily and disappear. And so, nosing, rubbing, they went to the win-
dow on the staircase, to the servants' bedrooms, to the boxes in the attics;
descending, blanched the apples on the dining-room table, fumbled the
petals of roses, tried the picture on the easel, brushed the mat and blew a
little sand along the floor. At length, desisting, all ceased together,
gathered together, all sighed together; all together gave off an aimless
gust of lamentation to which some door in the kitchen replied; swung
wide; admitted nothing; and slammed to.
[Here Mr Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It
was past midnight.]

103
Chapter 3
But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the dark-
ness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint
green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night,
however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and
deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen;
they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness.
The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags
kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on
marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far
away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight,
in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of la-
bour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the
shore.
It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, di-
vine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single,
distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we
deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitch-
ing the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his
treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it
seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should
ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered
pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse
only; our toil respite only.
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and
bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with
them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter
damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any
sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts,
a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself
to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine
promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and mak-
ing the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his

104
hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is use-
less in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and
why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an
answer.
[Mr Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched
his arms out, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night be-
fore, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]]

105
Chapter 4
So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled
round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in,
brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or
drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped,
wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already
furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left—a pair of
shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes—those
alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once
they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks
and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a
world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door
opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again.
Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its
sharp image on the wall opposite. Only the shadows of the trees, flour-
ishing in the wind, made obeisance on the wall, and for a moment
darkened the pool in which light reflected itself; or birds, flying, made a
soft spot flutter slowly across the bedroom floor.
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of
loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at
evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that
the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though
once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and
among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the
wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterat-
ing, and reiterating their questions—"Will you fade? Will you per-
ish?"—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure in-
tegrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should an-
swer: we remain.
Nothing it seemed could break that image, corrupt that innocence, or
disturb the swaying mantle of silence which, week after week, in the
empty room, wove into itself the falling cries of birds, ships hooting, the
drone and hum of the fields, a dog's bark, a man's shout, and folded

106
them round the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on the land-
ing; once in the middle of the night with a roar, with a rupture, as after
centuries of quiescence, a rock rends itself from the mountain and
hurtles crashing into the valley, one fold of the shawl loosened and
swung to and fro. Then again peace descended; and the shadow
wavered; light bent to its own image in adoration on the bedroom wall;
and Mrs McNab, tearing the veil of silence with hands that had stood in
the wash-tub, grinding it with boots that had crunched the shingle, came
as directed to open all windows, and dust the bedrooms.

107
Chapter 5
As she lurched (for she rolled like a ship at sea) and leered (for her eyes
fell on nothing directly, but with a sidelong glance that deprecated the
scorn and anger of the world—she was witless, she knew it), as she
clutched the banisters and hauled herself upstairs and rolled from room
to room, she sang. Rubbing the glass of the long looking-glass and leer-
ing sideways at her swinging figure a sound issued from her
lips—something that had been gay twenty years before on the stage per-
haps, had been hummed and danced to, but now, coming from the
toothless, bonneted, care-taking woman, was robbed of meaning, was
like the voice of witlessness, humour, persistency itself, trodden down
but springing up again, so that as she lurched, dusting, wiping, she
seemed to say how it was one long sorrow and trouble, how it was get-
ting up and going to bed again, and bringing things out and putting
them away again. It was not easy or snug this world she had known for
close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. How long,
she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, dusting
the boards, how long shall it endure? but hobbled to her feet again,
pulled herself up, and again with her sidelong leer which slipped and
turned aside even from her own face, and her own sorrows, stood and
gaped in the glass, aimlessly smiling, and began again the old amble and
hobble, taking up mats, putting down china, looking sideways in the
glass, as if, after all, she had her consolations, as if indeed there twined
about her dirge some incorrigible hope. Visions of joy there must have
been at the wash- tub, say with her children (yet two had been base-born
and one had deserted her), at the public-house, drinking; turning over
scraps in her drawers. Some cleavage of the dark there must have been,
some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough is-
sued to twist her face grinning in the glass and make her, turning to her
job again, mumble out the old music hall song. The mystic, the visionary,
walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone,
asking themselves "What am I," "What is this?" had suddenly an answer
vouchsafed them: (they could not say what it was) so that they were

108
warm in the frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs McNab contin-
ued to drink and gossip as before.

109
Chapter 6
The Spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in
her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide- eyed and
watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the be-
holders. [Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father's arm, was given in mar-
riage. What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added,
how beautiful she looked!]
As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to the
wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations
of the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the
wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought
purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vis-
ion within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy
water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams per-
sisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every
gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to
declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, hap-
piness prevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus to
range hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal of
intensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues,
something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, like
a diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.
Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming
and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted
her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed
to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.
[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with child-
birth, which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said,
had promised so well.]
And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the
house again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had
grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window
pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid

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itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pat-
tern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight glid-
ing gently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked and
came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long
stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the
shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer
nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to
murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the long
streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and
barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab,
when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a
tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.
But slumber and sleep though it might there came later in the summer
ominous sounds like the measured blows of hammers dulled on felt,
which, with their repeated shocks still further loosened the shawl and
cracked the tea-cups. Now and again some glass tinkled in the cupboard
as if a giant voice had shrieked so loud in its agony that tumblers stood
inside a cupboard vibrated too. Then again silence fell; and then, night
after night, and sometimes in plain mid-day when the roses were bright
and light turned on the wall its shape clearly there seemed to drop into
this silence, this indifference, this integrity, the thud of something falling.
[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in
France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was
instantaneous.]
At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of
the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they af-
firmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty—the
sunset on the sea, the pallor of dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats
against the moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other
with handfuls of grass, something out of harmony with this jocundity
and this serenity. There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured
ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland
surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.
This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections
and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was
difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the
landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty
outside mirrored beauty within.
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what
he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness,

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and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in
solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,
and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quies-
cence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet
loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the
beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was
broken.
[Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which
had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their in-
terest in poetry.]

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Chapter 7
Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-
like stillness of fine (had there been any one to listen) from the upper
rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning
could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves
disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose
brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of an-
other, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night
and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until
it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confu-
sion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
In spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants,
were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the
brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night,
with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking be-
fore them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.

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Chapter 8
Thinking no harm, for the family would not come, never again, some
said, and the house would be sold at Michaelmas perhaps, Mrs McNab
stooped and picked a bunch of flowers to take home with her. She laid
them on the table while she dusted. She was fond of flowers. It was a
pity to let them waste. Suppose the house were sold (she stood arms
akimbo in front of the looking-glass) it would want seeing to—it would.
There it had stood all these years without a soul in it. The books and
things were mouldy, for, what with the war and help being hard to get,
the house had not been cleaned as she could have wished. It was beyond
one person's strength to get it straight now. She was too old. Her legs
pained her. All those books needed to be laid out on the grass in the sun;
there was plaster fallen in the hall; the rain-pipe had blocked over the
study window and let the water in; the carpet was ruined quite. But
people should come themselves; they should have sent somebody down
to see. For there were clothes in the cupboards; they had left clothes in all
the bedrooms. What was she to do with them? They had the moth in
them—Mrs Ramsay's things. Poor lady! She would never want THEM
again. She was dead, they said; years ago, in London. There was the old
grey cloak she wore gardening (Mrs McNab fingered it). She could see
her, as she came up the drive with the washing, stooping over her
flowers (the garden was a pitiful sight now, all run to riot, and rabbits
scuttling at you out of the beds)—she could see her with one of the chil-
dren by her in that grey cloak. There were boots and shoes; and a brush
and comb left on the dressing-table, for all the world as if she expected to
come back tomorrow. (She had died very sudden at the end, they said.)
And once they had been coming, but had put off coming, what with the
war, and travel being so difficult these days; they had never come all
these years; just sent her money; but never wrote, never came, and ex-
pected to find things as they had left them, ah, dear! Why the dressing-
table drawers were full of things (she pulled them open), handkerchiefs,
bits of ribbon. Yes, she could see Mrs Ramsay as she came up the drive
with the washing.

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 "Good-evening, Mrs McNab," she would say.
She had a pleasant way with her. The girls all liked her. But, dear,
many things had changed since then (she shut the drawer); many famil-
ies had lost their dearest. So she was dead; and Mr Andrew killed; and
Miss Prue dead too, they said, with her first baby; but everyone had lost
some one these years. Prices had gone up shamefully, and didn't come
down again neither. She could well remember her in her grey cloak.
"Good-evening, Mrs McNab," she said, and told cook to keep a plate of
milk soup for her—quite thought she wanted it, carrying that heavy bas-
ket all the way up from town. She could see her now, stooping over her
flowers; and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the
end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went
wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the
wash-stand, as Mrs McNab hobbled and ambled, dusting, straightening.
And cook's name now? Mildred? Marian?—some name like that. Ah, she
had forgotten—she did forget things. Fiery, like all red-haired women.
Many a laugh they had had. She was always welcome in the kitchen. She
made them laugh, she did. Things were better then than now.
She sighed; there was too much work for one woman. She wagged her
head this side and that. This had been the nursery. Why, it was all damp
in here; the plaster was falling. Whatever did they want to hang a beast's
skull there? gone mouldy too. And rats in all the attics. The rain came in.
But they never sent; never came. Some of the locks had gone, so the
doors banged. She didn't like to be up here at dusk alone neither. It was
too much for one woman, too much, too much. She creaked, she
moaned. She banged the door. She turned the key in the lock, and left the
house alone, shut up, locked.

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Chapter 9
The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a
sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night
seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths,
fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the
mat decayed. Toads had nosed their way in. Idly, aimlessly, the swaying
shawl swung to and fro. A thistle thrust itself between the tiles in the lar-
der. The swallows nested in the drawing- roon; the floor was strewn
with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls; rafters were laid bare; rats car-
ried off this and that to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butter-
flies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the window-
pane. Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved
with long grass; giant artichokes towered among roses; a fringed carna-
tion flowered among the cabbages; while the gentle tapping of a weed at
the window had become, on winters' nights, a drumming from sturdy
trees and thorned briars which made the whole room green in summer.
What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of
nature? Mrs McNab's dream of a lady, of a child, of a plate of milk soup?
It had wavered over the walls like a spot of sunlight and vanished. She
had locked the door; she had gone. It was beyond the strength of one
woman, she said. They never sent. They never wrote. There were things
up there rotting in the drawers—it was a shame to leave them so, she
said. The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam
entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall
in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the
swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing
said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the
carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-
room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on
the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie
out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.
For now had come that moment, that hesitation when dawn trembles
and night pauses, when if a feather alight in the scale it will be weighed

116
down. One feather, and the house, sinking, falling, would have turned
and pitched downwards to the depths of darkness. In the ruined room,
picnickers would have lit their kettles; lovers sought shelter there, lying
on the bare boards; and the shepherd stored his dinner on the bricks, and
the tramp slept with his coat round him to ward off the cold. Then the
roof would have fallen; briars and hemlocks would have blotted out
path, step and window; would have grown, unequally but lustily over
the mound, until some trespasser, losing his way, could have told only
by a red-hot poker among the nettles, or a scrap of china in the hemlock,
that here once some one had lived; there had been a house.
If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the
whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of
oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly conscious;
something that leered, something that lurched; something not inspired to
go about its work with dignified ritual or solemn chanting. Mrs McNab
groaned; Mrs Bast creaked. They were old; they were stiff; their legs
ached. They came with their brooms and pails at last; they got to work.
All of a sudden, would Mrs McNab see that the house was ready, one of
the young ladies wrote: would she get this done; would she get that
done; all in a hurry. They might be coming for the summer; had left
everything to the last; expected to find things as they had left them.
Slowly and painfully, with broom and pail, mopping, scouring, Mrs
McNab, Mrs Bast, stayed the corruption and the rot; rescued from the
pool of Time that was fast closing over them now a basin, now a cup-
board; fetched up from oblivion all the Waverley novels and a tea-set
one morning; in the afternoon restored to sun and air a brass fender and
a set of steel fire-irons. George, Mrs Bast's son, caught the rats, and cut
the grass. They had the builders. Attended with the creaking of hinges
and the screeching of bolts, the slamming and banging of damp-swollen
woodwork, some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place, as the
women, stooping, rising, groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, up-
stairs now, now down in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!
They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes, or in the study; break-
ing off work at mid-day with the smudge on their faces, and their old
hands clasped and cramped with the broom handles. Flopped on chairs,
they contemplated now the magnificent conquest over taps and bath;
now the more arduous, more partial triumph over long rows of books,
black as ravens once, now white-stained, breeding pale mushrooms and
secreting furtive spiders. Once more, as she felt the tea warm in her, the
telescope fitted itself to Mrs McNab's eyes, and in a ring of light she saw

117
the old gentleman, lean as a rake, wagging his head, as she came up with
the washing, talking to himself, she supposed, on the lawn. He never no-
ticed her. Some said he was dead; some said she was dead. Which was
it? Mrs Bast didn't know for certain either. The young gentleman was
dead. That she was sure. She had read his name in the papers.
There was the cook now, Mildred, Marian, some such name as that—a
red- headed woman, quick-tempered like all her sort, but kind, too, if
you knew the way with her. Many a laugh they had had together. She
saved a plate of soup for Maggie; a bite of ham, sometimes; whatever
was over. They lived well in those days. They had everything they
wanted (glibly, jovially, with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of
memories, sitting in the wicker arm-chair by the nursery fender). There
was always plenty doing, people in the house, twenty staying some-
times, and washing up till long past midnight.
Mrs Bast (she had never known them; had lived in Glasgow at that
time) wondered, putting her cup down, whatever they hung that beast's
skull there for? Shot in foreign parts no doubt.
It might well be, said Mrs McNab, wantoning on with her memories;
they had friends in eastern countries; gentlemen staying there, ladies in
evening dress; she had seen them once through the dining-room door all
sitting at dinner. Twenty she dared say all in their jewellery, and she
asked to stay help wash up, might be till after midnight.
Ah, said Mrs Bast, they'd find it changed. She leant out of the window.
She watched her son George scything the grass. They might well ask,
what had been done to it? seeing how old Kennedy was supposed to
have charge of it, and then his leg got so bad after he fell from the cart;
and perhaps then no one for a year, or the better part of one; and then
Davie Macdonald, and seeds might be sent, but who should say if they
were ever planted? They'd find it changed.
She watched her son scything. He was a great one for work—one of
those quiet ones. Well they must be getting along with the cupboards,
she supposed. They hauled themselves up.
At last, after days of labour within, of cutting and digging without,
dusters were flicked from the windows, the windows were shut to, keys
were turned all over the house; the front door was banged; it was
finished.
And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the
mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermit-
tent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a bleat; irregu-
lar, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor

118
of cut grass, disevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dorbeetle, the
squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear
strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonising, but
they are never quite heard, never fully harmonised, and at last, in the
evening, one after another the sounds die out, and the harmony falters,
and silence falls. With the sunset sharpness was lost, and like mist rising,
quiet rose, quiet spread, the wind settled; loosely the world shook itself
down to sleep, darkly here without a light to it, save what came green
suffused through leaves, or pale on the white flowers in the bed by the
window.
[Lily Briscoe had her bag carried up to the house late one evening in
September. Mr Carmichael came by the same train.]

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Chapter 10
Then indeed peace had come. Messages of peace breathed from the sea
to the shore. Never to break its sleep any more, to lull it rather more
deeply to rest, and whatever the dreamers dreamt holily, dreamt wisely,
to confirm—what else was it murmuring—as Lily Briscoe laid her head
on the pillow in the clean still room and heard the sea. Through the open
window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly
to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were
plain? entreating the sleepers (the house was full again; Mrs Beckwith
was staying there, also Mr Carmichael), if they would not actually come
down to the beach itself at least to lift the blind and look out. They
would see then night flowing down in purple; his head crowned; his
sceptre jewelled; and how in his eyes a child might look. And if they still
faltered (Lily was tired out with travelling and slept almost at once; but
Mr Carmichael read a book by candlelight), if they still said no, that it
was vapour, this splendour of his, and the dew had more power than he,
and they preferred sleeping; gently then without complaint, or argu-
ment, the voice would sing its song. Gently the waves would break (Lily
heard them in her sleep); tenderly the light fell (it seemed to come
through her eyelids). And it all looked, Mr Carmichael thought, shutting
his book, falling asleep, much as it used to look.
Indeed the voice might resume, as the curtains of dark wrapped them-
selves over the house, over Mrs Beckwith, Mr Carmichael, and Lily
Briscoe so that they lay with several folds of blackness on their eyes, why
not accept this, be content with this, acquiesce and resign? The sigh of all
the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night
wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and
the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness, a cart grinding, a
dog somewhere barking, the sun lifted the curtains, broke the veil on
their eyes, and Lily Briscoe stirring in her sleep. She clutched at her
blankets as a faller clutches at the turf on the edge of a cliff. Her eyes
opened wide. Here she was again, she thought, sitting bold upright in
bed. Awake.

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 Part 3
The Lighthouse

121
Chapter 1
What does it mean then, what can it all mean? Lily Briscoe asked herself,
wondering whether, since she had been left alone, it behoved her to go to
the kitchen to fetch another cup of coffee or wait here. What does it
mean?—a catchword that was, caught up from some book, fitting her
thought loosely, for she could not, this first morning with the Ramsays,
contract her feelings, could only make a phrase resound to cover the
blankness of her mind until these vapours had shrunk. For really, what
did she feel, come back after all these years and Mrs Ramsay dead?
Nothing, nothing—nothing that she could express at all.
She had come late last night when it was all mysterious, dark. Now
she was awake, at her old place at the breakfast table, but alone. It was
very early too, not yet eight. There was this expedition—they were going
to the Lighthouse, Mr Ramsay, Cam, and James. They should have gone
already—they had to catch the tide or something. And Cam was not
ready and James was not ready and Nancy had forgotten to order the
sandwiches and Mr Ramsay had lost his temper and banged out of the
room.
"What's the use of going now?" he had stormed.
Nancy had vanished. There he was, marching up and down the terrace
in a rage. One seemed to hear doors slamming and voices calling all over
the house. Now Nancy burst in, and asked, looking round the room, in a
queer half dazed, half desperate way, "What does one send to the Light-
house?" as if she were forcing herself to do what she despaired of ever
being able to do.
What does one send to the Lighthouse indeed! At any other time Lily
could have suggested reasonably tea, tobacco, newspapers. But this
morning everything seemed so extraordinarily queer that a question like
Nancy's—What does one send to the Lighthouse?—opened doors in
one's mind that went banging and swinging to and fro and made one
keep asking, in a stupefied gape, What does one send? What does one
do? Why is one sitting here, after all?

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 Sitting alone (for Nancy went out again) among the clean cups at the
long table, she felt cut off from other people, and able only to go on
watching, asking, wondering. The house, the place, the morning, all
seemed strangers to her. She had no attachment here, she felt, no rela-
tions with it, anything might happen, and whatever did happen, a step
outside, a voice calling ("It's not in the cupboard; it's on the landing,"
some one cried), was a question, as if the link that usually bound things
together had been cut, and they floated up here, down there, off, any-
how. How aimless it was,, how chaotic, how unreal it was, she thought,
looking at her empty coffee cup. Mrs Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue
dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. And we all
get together in a house like this on a morning like this, she said, looking
out of the window. It was a beautiful still day.

123
Chapter 2
Suddenly Mr Ramsay raised his head as he passed and looked straight at
her, with his distraught wild gaze which was yet so penetrating, as if he
saw you, for one second, for the first time, for ever; and she pretended to
drink out of her empty coffee cup so as to escape him—to escape his de-
mand on her, to put aside a moment longer that imperious need. And he
shook his head at her, and strode on ("Alone" she heard him say,
"Perished" she heard him say) and like everything else this strange
morning the words became symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-
green walls. If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out
in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things. Old Mr
Carmichael came padding softly in, fetched his coffee, took his cup and
made off to sit in the sun. The extraordinary unreality was frightening;
but it was also exciting. Going to the Lighthouse. But what does one send
to the Lighthouse? Perished. Alone. The grey-green light on the wall op-
posite. The empty places. Such were some of the parts, but how bring
them together? she asked. As if any interruption would break the frail
shape she was building on the table she turned her back to the window
lest Mr Ramsay should see her. She must escape somewhere, be alone
somewhere. Suddenly she remembered. When she had sat there last ten
years ago there had been a little sprig or leaf pattern on the table-cloth,
which she had looked at in a moment of revelation. There had been a
problem about a foreground of a picture. Move the tree to the middle,
she had said. She had never finished that picture. She would paint that
picture now. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years.
Where were her paints, she wondered? Her paints, yes. She had left them
in the hall last night. She would start at once. She got up quickly, before
Mr Ramsay turned.
She fetched herself a chair. She pitched her easel with her precise old-
maidish movements on the edge of the lawn, not too close to Mr Carmi-
chael, but close enough for his protection. Yes, it must have been pre-
cisely here that she had stood ten years ago. There was the wall; the
hedge; the tree. The question was of some relation between those masses.

124
She had borne it in her mind all these years. It seemed as if the solution
had come to her: she knew now what she wanted to do.
But with Mr Ramsay bearing down on her, she could do nothing.
Every time he approached—he was walking up and down the ter-
race—ruin approached, chaos approached. She could not paint. She
stooped, she turned; she took up this rag; she squeezed that tube. But all
she did was to ward him off a moment. He made it impossible for her to
do anything. For if she gave him the least chance, if he saw her disen-
gaged a moment, looking his way a moment, he would be on her, saying,
as he had said last night, "You find us much changed." Last night he had
got up and stopped before her, and said that. Dumb and staring though
they had all sat, the six children whom they used to call after the Kings
and Queens of England—the Red, the Fair, the Wicked, the Ruth-
less—she felt how they raged under it. Kind old Mrs Beckwith said
something sensible. But it was a house full of unrelated passions—she
had felt that all the evening. And on top of this chaos Mr Ramsay got up,
pressed her hand, and said: "You will find us much changed" and none
of them had moved or had spoken; but had sat there as if they were
forced to let him say it. Only James (certainly the Sullen) scowled at the
lamp; and Cam screwed her handkerchief round her finger. Then he re-
minded them that they were going to the Lighthouse tomorrow. They
must be ready, in the hall, on the stroke of half-past seven. Then, with his
hand on the door, he stopped; he turned upon them. Did they not want
to go? he demanded. Had they dared say No (he had some reason for
wanting it) he would have flung himself tragically backwards into the
bitter waters of depair. Such a gift he had for gesture. He looked like a
king in exile. Doggedly James said yes. Cam stumbled more wretchedly.
Yes, oh, yes, they'd both be ready, they said. And it struck her, this was
tragedy—not palls, dust, and the shroud; but children coerced, their spir-
its subdued. James was sixteen, Cam, seventeen, perhaps. She had
looked round for some one who was not there, for Mrs Ramsay, presum-
ably. But there was only kind Mrs Beckwith turning over her sketches
under the lamp. Then, being tired, her mind still rising and falling with
the sea, the taste and smell that places have after long absence possessing
her, the candles wavering in her eyes, she had lost herself and gone un-
der. It was a wonderful night, starlit; the waves sounded as they went
upstairs; the moon surprised them, enormous, pale, as they passed the
staircase window. She had slept at once.
She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail, but
she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr Ramsay and his

125
exactingness. She did her best to look, when his back was turned, at her
picture; that line there, that mass there. But it was out of the question. Let
him be fifty feet away, let him not even speak to you, let him not even
see you, he permeated, he prevailed, he imposed himself. He changed
everything. She could not see the colour; she could not see the lines; even
with his back turned to her, she could only think, But he'll be down on
me in a moment, demanding—something she felt she could not give
him. She rejected one brush; she chose another. When would those chil-
dren come? When would they all be off? she fidgeted. That man, she
thought, her anger rising in her, never gave; that man took. She, on the
other hand, would be forced to give. Mrs Ramsay had given. Giving, giv-
ing, giving, she had died—and had left all this. Really, she was angry
with Mrs Ramsay. With the brush slightly trembling in her fingers she
looked at the hedge, the step, the wall. It was all Mrs Ramsay's doing.
She was dead. Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to
do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing
one did not play at, and it was all Mrs Ramsay's fault. She was dead. The
step where she used to sit was empty. She was dead.
But why repeat this over and over again? Why be always trying to
bring up some feeling she had not got? There was a kind of blasphemy in
it. It was all dry: all withered: all spent. They ought not to have asked
her; she ought not to have come. One can't waste one's time at forty-
four, she thought. She hated playing at painting. A brush, the one de-
pendable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos—that one should not play
with, knowingly even: she detested it. But he made her. You shan't touch
your canvas, he seemed to say, bearing down on her, till you've given me
what I want of you. Here he was, close upon her again, greedy, dis-
traught. Well, thought Lily in despair, letting her right hand fall at her
side, it would be simpler then to have it over. Surely, she could imitate
from recollection the glow, the rhapsody, the self-surrender, she had
seen on so many women's faces (on Mrs Ramsay's, for instance) when on
some occasion like this they blazed up—she could remember the look on
Mrs Ramsay's face—into a rapture of sympathy, of delight in the reward
they had, which, though the reason of it escaped her, evidently conferred
on them the most supreme bliss of which human nature was capable.
Here he was, stopped by her side. She would give him what she could.

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Chapter 3
She seemed to have shrivelled slightly, he thought. She looked a little
skimpy, wispy; but not unattractive. He liked her. There had been some
talk of her marrying William Bankes once, but nothing had come of it.
His wife had been fond of her. He had been a little out of temper too at
breakfast. And then, and then—this was one of those moments when an
enormous need urged him, without being conscious what it was, to ap-
proach any woman, to force them, he did not care how, his need was so
great, to give him what he wanted: sympathy.
Was anybody looking after her? he said. Had she everything she
wanted?
"Oh, thanks, everything," said Lily Briscoe nervously. No; she could
not do it. She ought to have floated off instantly upon some wave of
sympathetic expansion: the pressure on her was tremendous. But she re-
mained stuck. There was an awful pause. They both looked at the sea.
Why, thought Mr Ramsay, should she look at the sea when I am here?
She hoped it would be calm enough for them to land at the Lighthouse,
she said. The Lighthouse! The Lighthouse! What's that got to do with it?
he thought impatiently. Instantly, with the force of some primeval gust
(for really he could not restrain himself any longer), there issued from
him such a groan that any other woman in the whole world would have
done something, said something—all except myself, thought Lily, gird-
ing at herself bitterly, who am not a woman, but a peevish, ill-tempered,
dried-up old maid, presumably.
[Mr Ramsay sighed to the full. He waited. Was she not going to say
anything? Did she not see what he wanted from her? Then he said he
had a particular reason for wanting to go to the Lighthouse. His wife
used to send the men things. There was a poor boy with a tuberculous
hip, the lightkeeper's son. He sighed profoundly. He sighed significantly.
All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hun-
ger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to
him entirely, and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied

127
for ever, should leave her, should be diverted (she kept looking at the
house, hoping for an interruption) before it swept her down in its flow.
"Such expeditions," said Mr Ramsay, scraping the ground with his toe,
"are very painful." Still Lily said nothing. (She is a stock, she is a stone, he
said to himself.) "They are very exhausting," he said, looking, with a
sickly look that nauseated her (he was acting, she felt, this great man was
dramatising himself), at his beautiful hands. It was horrible, it was inde-
cent. Would they never come, she asked, for she could not sustain this
enormous weight of sorrow, support these heavy draperies of grief (he
had assumed a pose of extreme decreptitude; he even tottered a little as
he stood there) a moment longer.
Still she could say nothing; the whole horizon seemed swept bare of
objects to talk about; could only feel, amazedly, as Mr Ramsay stood
there, how his gaze seemed to fall dolefully over the sunny grass and
discolour it, and cast over the rubicund, drowsy, entirely contented fig-
ure of Mr Carmichael, reading a French novel on a deck-chair, a veil of
crape, as if such an existence, flaunting its prosperity in a world of woe,
were enough to provoke the most dismal thoughts of all. Look at him, he
seemed to be saying, look at me; and indeed, all the time he was feeling,
Think of me, think of me. Ah, could that bulk only be wafted alongside
of them, Lily wished; had she only pitched her easel a yard or two closer
to him; a man, any man, would staunch this effusion, would stop these
lamentations. A woman, she had provoked this horror; a woman, she
should have known how to deal with it. It was immensely to her discred-
it, sexually, to stand there dumb. One said—what did one say?—Oh, Mr
Ramsay! Dear Mr Ramsay! That was what that kind old lady who
sketched, Mrs Beckwith, would have said instantly, and rightly. But, no.
They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-
pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at ther
feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her
skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete
silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.
Heaven could never be sufficiently praised! She heard sounds in the
house. James and Cam must be coming. But Mr Ramsay, as if he knew
that his time ran short, exerted upon her solitary figure the immense
pressure of his concentrated woe; his age; his frailty: his desolation;
when suddenly, tossing his head impatiently, in his annoyance—for after
all, what woman could resist him?—he noticed that his boot-laces were
untied. Remarkable boots they were too, Lily thought, looking down at
them: sculptured; colossal; like everything that Mr Ramsay wore, from

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his frayed tie to his half-buttoned waistcoat, his own indisputably. She
could see them walking to his room of their own accord, expressive in
his absence of pathos, surliness, ill-temper, charm.
"What beautiful boots!" she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To
praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had
shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, and asked her to pity
them, then to say, cheerfully, "Ah, but what beautiful boots you wear!"
deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it in one of his
sudden roars of ill-temper complete annihilation.
Instead, Mr Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell
from him. Ah, yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they
were first-rate boots. There was only one man in England who could
make boots like that. Boots are among the chief curses of mankind, he
said. "Bootmakers make it their business," he exclaimed, "to cripple and
torture the human foot." They are also the most obstinate and perverse of
mankind. It had taken him the best part of his youth to get boots made as
they should be made. He would have her observe (he lifted his right foot
and then his left) that she had never seen boots made quite that shape
before. They were made of the finest leather in the world, also. Most
leather was mere brown paper and cardboard. He looked complacently
at his foot, still held in the air. They had reached, she felt, a sunny island
where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the
blessed island of good boots. Her heart warmed to him. "Now let me see
if you can tie a knot," he said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He
showed her his own invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone.
Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it.
Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping
over her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that,
as she stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her cal-
lousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell and
tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of infinite
pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. There was no helping Mr Ram-
say on the journey he was going. But now just as she wished to say
something, could have said something, perhaps, here they were—Cam
and James. They appeared on the terrace. They came, lagging, side by
side, a serious, melancholy couple.
But why was it like THAT that they came? She could not help feeling
annoyed with them; they might have come more cheerfully; they might
have given him what, now that they were off, she would not have the
chance of giving him. For she felt a sudden emptiness; a frustration. Her

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feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer needed it.
He had become a very distinguished, elderly man, who had no need of
her whatsoever. She felt snubbed. He slung a knapsack round his
shoulders. He shared out the parcels—there were a number of them, ill
tied in brown paper. He sent Cam for a cloak. He had all the appearance
of a leader making ready for an expedition. Then, wheeling about, he led
the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying
brown paper parcels, down the path, his children following him. They
looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them to some stern enter-
prise, and they went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent in
their father's wake, obediently, but with a pallor in their eyes which
made her feel that they suffered something beyond their years in silence.
So they passed the edge of the lawn, and it seemed to Lily that she
watched a procession go, drawn on by some stress of common feeling
which made it, faltering and flagging as it was, a little company bound
together and strangely impressive to her. Politely, but very distantly, Mr
Ramsay raised his hand and saluted her as they passed.
But what a face, she thought, immediately finding the sympathy
which she had not been asked to give troubling her for expression. What
had made it like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed—about
the reality of kitchen tables, she added, remembering the symbol which
in her vagueness as to what Mr Ramsay did think about Andrew had
given her. (He had been killed by the splinter of a shell instantly, she be-
thought her.) The kitchen table was something visionary, austere;
something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it was
all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain. But Mr Ramsay
kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be distracted
or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic and partook of
this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her. Then, she re-
called (standing where he had left her, holding her brush), worries had
fretted it—not so nobly. He must have had his doubts about that table,
she supposed; whether the table was a real table; whether it was worth
the time he gave to it; whether he was able after all to find it. He had had
doubts, she felt, or he would have asked less of people. That was what
they talked about late at night sometimes, she suspected; and then next
day Mrs Ramsay looked tired, and Lily flew into a rage with him over
some absurd little thing. But now he had nobody to talk to about that
table, or his boots, or his knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he
could devour, and his face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration
in it which alarmed her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And

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then, she recalled, there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare
(when she praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and in-
terest in ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he
was always changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase which
was new to her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of her own
irritability, when it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and
the hope of sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other
region, was drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with
himself or another, at the head of that little procession out of one's range.
An extraordinary face! The gate banged.

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Chapter 4
So they're gone, she thought, sighing with relief and disappointment.
Her sympathy seemed to be cast back on her, like a bramble sprung
across her face. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her were
drawn out there—it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked this
morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed itself doggedly,
solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had floated up and
placed itself white and uncompromising directly before her. It seemed to
rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry and agitation; this folly
and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled her and spread through her
mind first a peace, as her disorderly sensations (he had gone and she had
been so sorry for him and she had said nothing) trooped off the field;
and then, emptiness. She looked blankly at the canvas, with its uncom-
promising white stare; from the canvas to the garden. There was
something (she stood screwing up her little Chinese eyes in her small
puckered face), something she remembered in the relations of those lines
cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green
cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied
a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she
walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found
herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the
knot in imagination. But there was all the difference in the world
between this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking
her brush and making the first mark.
She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr Ramsay's pres-
ence, and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the
wrong angle. And now that she had ut that right, and in so doing had
subdued the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention
and made her remember how she was such and such a person, had such
and such relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush. For
a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air.
Where to begin?—that was the question at what point to make the first
mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable

132
risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed
simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape
themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among
them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must
be run; the mark made.
With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at
the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive
stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it
left a running mark. A second time she did it—a third time. And so
pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement,
as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and
all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored
her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner
settled there than they enclosed ( she felt it looming out at her) a space.
Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher
and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that
space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it,
drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into
the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers—this other thing,
this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark
at the back of appearances and commanded her attention. She was half
unwilling, half reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away?
Why not left in peace, to talk to Mr Carmichael on the lawn? It was an
exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were con-
tent with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this
form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker
table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which
one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex,
she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the
concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she
seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some
windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of
doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the canvas, lightly scored
with running lines. It would be hung in the servants' bedrooms. It would
be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa. What was the good of doing it
then, and she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she
couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those habitual currents
in which after a certain time experience forms in the mind, so that one re-
peats words without being aware any longer who originally spoke them.

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 Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously con-
sidering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed before
her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then, as if some
juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were spontaneously
squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues and umbers,
moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier and went
slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was dictated to her
(she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what she rhythm was
strong enough to bear her along with it on its current. Certainly she was
losing consciousness of outer things. And as she lost consciousness of
outer things, and her name and her personality and her appearance, and
whether Mr Carmichael was there or not, her mind kept throwing up
from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and
ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring, hideously difficult white
space, while she modelled it with greens and blues.
Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can't paint,
can't write. Coming up behind her, he had stood close beside her, a thing
she hated, as she painted her on this very spot. "Shag tobacco," he said,
"fivepence an ounce," parading his poverty, his principles. (But the war
had drawn the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one thought, poor
devils, of both sexes.) He was always carrying a book about under his
arm—a purple book. He "worked." He sat, she remembered, working in
a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in the middle of the view. But
after all, she reflected, there was the scene on the beach. One must re-
member that. It was a windy morning. They had all gone down to the
beach. Mrs Ramsay sat down and wrote letters by a rock. She wrote and
wrote. "Oh," she said, looking up at something floating in the sea, "is it a
lobster pot? Is it an upturned boat?" She was so short-sighted that she
could not see, and then Charles Tansley became as nice as he could pos-
sibly be. He began playing ducks and drakes. They chose little flat black
stones and sent them skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs
Ramsay looked up over her spectacles and laughed at them. What they
said she could not remember, but only she and Charles throwing stones
and getting on very well all of a sudden and Mrs Ramsay watching
them. She was highly conscious of that. Mrs Ramsay, she thought, step-
ping back and screwing up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a
good deal when she was sitting on the step with James. There must have
been a shadow.) When she thought of herself and Charles throwing
ducks and drakes and of the whole scene on the beach, it seemed to de-
pend somehow upon Mrs Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on

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her knee, writing letters. (She wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes
the wind took them and she and Charles just saved a page from the sea.)
But what a power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sit-
ting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity;
made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together
this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness
and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and
spiteful) something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment
of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete,
so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it
stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art.
"Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the
drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And,
resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which
traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question
which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she
released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused
over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all—a
simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great
revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come.
Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck un-
expectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself
and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them
together; Mrs Ramsay saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs Ramsay making
of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself
tried to make of the moment something permanent)—this was of the
nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal
passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shak-
ing) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs Ramsay said. "Mrs
Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all to her.
All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring in the house. She
looked at it there sleeping in the early sunlight with its windows green
and blue with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was thinking of
Mrs Ramsay seemed in consonance with this quiet house; this smoke;
this fine early morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly pure and
exciting. She hoped nobody would open the window or come out of the
house, but that she might be left alone to go on thinking, to go on paint-
ing. She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some curiosity, driven by
the discomfort of the sympathy which she held undischarged, she
walked a pace or so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down there on

135
the beach, she could see that little company setting sail. Down there
among the little boats which floated, some with their sails furled, some
slowly, for it was very calm moving away, there was one rather apart
from the others. The sail was even now being hoisted. She decided that
there in that very distant and entirely silent little boat Mr Ramsay was
sitting with Cam and James. Now they had got the sail up; now after a
little flagging and silence, she watched the boat take its way with delib-
eration past the other boats out to sea.

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Chapter 5
The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and slapped the
sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then
the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the ripple ran over them
and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr Ramsay sat in the
middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James thought,
and Cam thought, looking at her father, who sat in the middle of the
boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his
legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure enough, after fidgeting
a second or two, he said something sharp to Macalister's boy, who got
out his oars and began to row. But their father, they knew, would never
be content until they were flying along. He would keep looking for a
breeze, fidgeting, saying things under his breath, which Macalister and
and Macalister's boy would overhear, and they would both be made hor-
ribly uncomfortable. He had made them come. He had forced them to
come. In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never rise, that he
might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had forced them to
come against their wills.
All the way down to the beach they had lagged behind together,
though he bade them "Walk up, walk up," without speaking. Their heads
were bent down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless
gale. Speak to him they could not. They must come; they must follow.
They must walk behind him carrying brown paper parcels. But they
vowed, in silence, as they walked, to stand by each other and carry out
the great compact—to resist tyranny to the death. So there they would
sit, one at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence. They would
say nothing, only look at him now and then where he sat with his legs
twisted, frowning and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and mutter-
ing things to himself, and waiting impatiently for a breeze. And they
hoped it would be calm. They hoped he would be thwarted. They hoped
the whole expedition would fail, and they would have to put back, with
their parcels, to the beach.

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 But now, when Macalister's boy had rowed a little way out, the sails
slowly swung round, the boat quickened itself, flattened itself, and shot
off. Instantly, as if some great strain had been relieved, Mr Ramsay un-
curled his legs, took out his tobacco pouch, handed it with a little grunt
to Macalister, and felt, they knew, for all they suffered, perfectly content.
Now they would sail on for hours like this, and Mr Ramsay would ask
old Macalister a question—about the great storm last winter prob-
ably—and old Macalister would answer it, and they would puff their
pipes together, and Macalister would take a tarry rope in his fingers, ty-
ing or untying some knot, and the boy would fish, and never say a word
to any one. James would be forced to keep his eye all the time on the sail.
For if he forgot, then the sail puckered and shivered, and the boat
slackened, and Mr Ramsay would say sharply, "Look out! Look out!" and
old Macalister would turn slowly on his seat. So they heard Mr Ramsay
asking some question about the great storm at Christmas. "She comes
driving round the point," old Macalister said, describing the great storm
last Christmas, when ten ships had been driven into the bay for shelter,
and he had seen "one there, one there, one there" (he pointed slowly
round the bay. Mr Ramsay followed him, turning his head). He had seen
four men clinging to the mast. Then she was gone. "And at last we
shoved her off," he went on (but in their anger and their silence they only
caught a word here and there, sitting at opposite ends of the boat, united
by their compact to fight tyranny to the death). At last they had shoved
her off, they had launched the lifeboat, and they had got her out past the
point—Macalister told the story; and though they only caught a word
here and there, they were conscious all the time of their father—how he
leant forward, how he brought his voice into tune with Macalister's
voice; how, puffing at his pipe, and looking there and there where Mac-
alister pointed, he relished the thought of the storm and the dark night
and the fishermen striving there. He liked that men should labour and
sweat on the windy beach at night; pitting muscle and brain against the
waves and the wind; he liked men to work like that, and women to keep
house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were
drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell, so Cam could tell
(they looked at him, they looked at each other), from his toss and his vi-
gilance and the ring in his voice, and the little tinge of Scottish accent
which came into his voice, making him seem like a peasant himself, as he
questioned Macalister about the eleven ships that had been driven into
the bay in a storm. Three had sunk.

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 He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and Cam thought, feel-
ing proud of him without knowing quite why, had he been there he
would have launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the wreck,
Cam thought. He was so brave, he was so adventurous, Cam thought.
But she remembered. There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the
death. Their grievance weighed them down. They had been forced; they
had been bidden. He had borne them down once more with his gloom
and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning,
come, because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse;
take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory
of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, all the
pleasure of the day was spoilt.
Yes, the breeze was freshening. The boat was leaning, the water was
sliced sharply and fell away in green cascades, in bubbles, in cataracts.
Cam looked down into the foam, into the sea with all its treasure in it,
and its speed hypnotised her, and the tie between her and James sagged
a little. It slackened a little. She began to think, How fast it goes. Where
are we going? and the movement hypnotised her, while James, with his
eye fixed on the sail and on the horizon, steered grimly. But he began to
think as he steered that he might escape; he might be quit of it all. They
might land somewhere; and be free then. Both of them, looking at each
other for a moment, had a sense of escape and exaltation, what with the
speed and the change. But the breeze bred in Mr Ramsay too the same
excitement, and, as old Macalister turned to fling his line overboard, he
cried out aloud,
"We perished," and then again, "each alone." And then with his usual
spasm of repentance or shyness, pulled himself up, and waved his hand
towards the shore.
"See the little house," he said pointing, wishing Cam to look. She
raised herself reluctantly and looked. But which was it? She could no
longer make out, there on the hillside, which was their house. All looked
distant and peaceful and strange. The shore seemed refined, far away,
unreal. Already the little distance they had sailed had put them far from
it and given it the changed look, the composed look, of something reced-
ing in which one has no longer any part. Which was their house? She
could not see it.
"But I beneath a rougher sea," Mr Ramsay murmured. He had found
the house and so seeing it, he had also seen himself there; he had seen
himself walking on the terrace, alone. He was walking up and down
between the urns; and he seemed to himself very old and bowed. Sitting

139
in the boat, he bowed, he crouched himself, acting instantly his part—
the part of a desolate man, widowed, bereft; and so called up before him
in hosts people sympathising with him; staged for himself as he sat in
the boat, a little drama; which required of him decrepitude and exhaus-
tion and sorrow (he raised his hands and looked at the thinness of them,
to confirm his dream) and then there was given him in abundance
women's sympathy, and he imagined how they would soothe him and
sympathise with him, and so getting in his dream some reflection of the
exquisite pleasure women's sympathy was to him, he sighed and said
gently and mournfully:
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,
so that the mournful words were heard quite clearly by them all. Cam
half started on her seat. It shocked her—it outraged her. The movement
roused her father; and he shuddered, and broke off, exclaiming: "Look!
Look!" so urgently that James also turned his head to look over his
shoulder at the island. They all looked. They looked at the island.
But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and
the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were
gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real;
the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the
noise of the waves—all this was real. Thinking this, she was murmuring
to herself, "We perished, each alone," for her father's words broke and
broke again in her mind, when her father, seeing her gazing so vaguely,
began to tease her. Didn't she know the points of the compass? he asked.
Didn't she know the North from the South? Did she really think they
lived right out there? And he pointed again, and showed her where their
house was, there, by those trees. He wished she would try to be more ac-
curate, he said: "Tell me—which is East, which is West?" he said, half
laughing at her, half scolding her, for he could not understand the state
of mind of any one, not absolutely imbecile, who did not know the
points of the compass. Yet she did not know. And seeing her gazing,
with her vague, now rather frightened, eyes fixed where no house was
Mr Ramsay forgot his dream; how he walked up and down between the
urns on the terrace; how the arms were stretched out to him. He thought,
women are always like that; the vagueness of their minds is hopeless; it
was a thing he had never been able to understand; but so it was. It had
been so with her—his wife. They could not keep anything clearly fixed in
their minds. But he had been wrong to be angry with her; moreover, did
he not rather like this vagueness in women? It was part of their

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extraordinary charm. I will make her smile at me, he thought. She looks
frightened. She was so silent. He clutched his fingers, and determined
that his voice and his face and all the quick expressive gestures which
had been at his command making people pity him and praise him all
these years should subdue themselves. He would make her smile at him.
He would find some simple easy thing to say to her. But what? For,
wrapped up in his work as he was, he forgot the sort of thing one said.
There was a puppy. They had a puppy. Who was looking after the
puppy today? he asked. Yes, thought James pitilessly, seeing his sister's
head against the sail, now she will give way. I shall be left to fight the
tyrant alone. The compact would be left to him to carry out. Cam would
never resist tyranny to the death, he thought grimly, watching her face,
sad, sulky, yielding. And as sometimes happens when a cloud falls on a
green hillside and gravity descends and there among all the surrounding
hills is gloom and sorrow, and it seems as if the hills themselves must
ponder the fate of the clouded, the darkened, either in pity, or mali-
ciously rejoicing in her dismay: so Cam now felt herself overcast, as she
sat there among calm, resolute people and wondered how to answer her
father about the puppy; how to resist his entreaty—forgive me, care for
me; while James the lawgiver, with the tablets of eternal wisdom laid
open on his knee (his hand on the tiller had become symbolical to her),
said, Resist him. Fight him. He said so rightly; justly. For they must fight
tyranny to the death, she thought. Of all human qualities she reverenced
justice most. Her brother was most god-like, her father most suppliant.
And to which did she yield, she thought, sitting between them, gazing at
the shore whose points were all unknown to her, and thinking how the
lawn and the terrace and the house were smoothed away now and peace
dwelt there.
"Jasper," she said sullenly. He'd look after the puppy.
And what was she going to call him? her father persisted. He had had
a dog when he was a little boy, called Frisk. She'll give way, James
thought, as he watched a look come upon her face, a look he re-
membered. They look down he thought, at their knitting or something.
Then suddenly they look up. There was a flash of blue, he remembered,
and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was
very angry. It must have been his mother, he thought, sitting on a low
chair, with his father standing over her. He began to search among the
infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf,
fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds;
voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping;

141
and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and
down and stopped dead, upright, over them. Meanwhile, he noticed,
Cam dabbled her fingers in the water, and stared at the shore and said
nothing. No, she won't give way, he thought; she's different, he thought.
Well, if Cam would not answer him, he would not bother her Mr Ram-
say decided, feeling in his pocket for a book. But she would answer him;
she wished, passionately, to move some obstacle that lay upon her
tongue and to say, Oh, yes, Frisk. I'll call him Frisk. She wanted even to
say, Was that the dog that found its way over the moor alone? But try as
she might, she could think of nothing to say like that, fierce and loyal to
the compact, yet passing on to her father, unsuspected by James, a
private token of the love she felt for him. For she thought, dabbling her
hand (and now Macalister's boy had caught a mackerel, and it lay kick-
ing on the floor, with blood on its gills) for she thought, looking at James
who kept his eyes dispassionately on the sail, or glanced now and then
for a second at the horizon, you're not exposed to it, to this pressure and
division of feeling, this extraordinary temptation. Her father was feeling
in his pockets; in another second, he would have found his book. For no
one attracted her more; his hands were beautiful, and his feet, and his
voice, and his words, and his haste, and his temper, and his oddity, and
his passion, and his saying straight out before every one, we perish, each
alone, and his remoteness. (He had opened his book.) But what remained
intolerable, she thought, sitting upright, and watching Macalister's boy
tug the hook out of the gills of another fish, was that crass blindness and
tyranny of his which had poisoned her childhood and raised bitter
storms, so that even now she woke in the night trembling with rage and
remembered some command of his; some insolence: "Do this," "Do that,"
his dominance: his "Submit to me."
So she said nothing, but looked doggedly and sadly at the shore,
wrapped in its mantle of peace; as if the people there had fallen asleep,
she thought; were free like smoke, were free to come and go like ghosts.
They have no suffering there, she thought.

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Chapter 6
Yes, that is their boat, Lily Briscoe decided, standing on the edge of the
lawn. It was the boat with greyish-brown sails, which she saw now flat-
ten itself upon the water and shoot off across the bay. There he sits, she
thought, and the children are quite silent still. And she could not reach
him either. The sympathy she had not given him weighed her down. It
made it difficult for her to paint.
She had always found him difficult. She never had been able to praise
him to his face, she remembered. And that reduced their relationship to
something neutral, without that element of sex in it which made his
manner to Minta so gallant, almost gay. He would pick a flower for her,
lend her his books. But could he believe that Minta read them? She
dragged them about the garden, sticking in leaves to mark the place.
"D'you remember, Mr Carmichael?" she was inclined to ask, looking at
the old man. But he had pulled his hat half over his forehead; he was
asleep, or he was dreaming, or he was lying there catching words, she
supposed.
"D'you remember?" she felt inclined to ask him as she passed him,
thinking again of Mrs Ramsay on the beach; the cask bobbing up and
down; and the pages flying. Why, after all these years had that survived,
ringed round, lit up, visible to the last detail, with all before it blank and
all after it blank, for miles and miles?
"Is it a boat? Is it a cork?" she would say, Lily repeated, turning back,
reluctantly again, to her canvas. Heaven be praised for it, the problem of
space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her.
The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful
and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one col-
our melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but be-
neath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be
a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dis-
lodge with a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and
she began to model her way into the hollow there. At the same time, she
seemed to be sitting beside Mrs Ramsay on the beach.

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 "Is it a boat? Is it a cask?" Mrs Ramsay said. And she began hunting
round for her spectacles. And she sat, having found them, silent, looking
out to sea. And Lily, painting steadily, felt as if a door had opened, and
one went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like
place, very dark, very solemn. Shouts came from a world far away.
Steamers vanished in stalks of smoke on the horizon. Charles threw
stones and sent them skipping.
Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence,
uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relation-
ships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the
moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs
Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this si-
lence by her side) by saying them? Aren't we more expressive thus? The
moment at least seemed extraordinarily fertile. She rammed a little hole
in the sand and covered it up, by way of burying in it the perfection of
the moment. It was like a drop of silver in which one dipped and il-
lumined the darkness of the past.
Lily stepped back to get her canvas—so—into perspective. It was an
odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further,
until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over
the sea. And as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the
past there. Now Mrs Ramsay got up, she remembered. It was time to go
back to the house—time for luncheon. And they all walked up from the
beach together, she walking behind with William Bankes, and there was
Minta in front of them with a hole in her stocking. How that little round
hole of pink heel seemed to flaunt itself before them! How William
Bankes deplored it, without, so far as she could remember, saying any-
thing about it! It meant to him the annihilation of womanhood, and dirt
and disorder, and servants leaving and beds not made at mid-day—all
the things he most abhorred. He had a way of shuddering and spreading
his fingers out as if to cover an unsightly object which he did
now—holding his hand in front of him. And Minta walked on ahead,
and presumably Paul met her and she went off with Paul in the garden.
The Rayleys, thought Lily Briscoe, squeezing her tube of green paint.
She collected her impressions of the Rayleys. Their lives appeared to her
in a series of scenes; one, on the staircase at dawn. Paul had come in and
gone to bed early; Minta was late. There was Minta, wreathed, tinted,
garish on the stairs about three o'clock in the morning. Paul came out in
his pyjamas carrying a poker in case of burglars. Minta was eating a
sandwich, standing half-way up by a window, in the cadaverous early

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morning light, and the carpet had a hole in it. But what did they say?
Lily asked herself, as if by looking she could hear them. Minta went on
eating her sandwich, annoyingly, while he spoke something violent, ab-
using her, in a mutter so as not to wake the children, the two little boys.
He was withered, drawn; she flamboyant, careless. For things had
worked loose after the first year or so; the marriage had turned out
rather badly.
And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this mak-
ing up scenes about them, is what we call "knowing" people, "thinking"
of them, "being fond" of them! Not a word of it was true; she had made it
up; but it was what she knew them by all the same. She went on tunnel-
ling her way into her picture, into the past.
Another time, Paul said he "played chess in coffee-houses." She had
built up a whole structure of imagination on that saying too. She re-
membered how, as he said it, she thought how he rang up the servant,
and she said, "Mrs Rayley's out, sir," and he decided that he would not
come home either. She saw him sitting in the corner of some lugubrious
place where the smoke attached itself to the red plush seats, and the
waitresses got to know you, and he played chess with a little man who
was in the tea trade and lived at Surbiton, but that was all Paul knew
about him. And then Minta was out when he came home and then there
was that scene on the stairs, when he got the poker in case of burglars
(no doubt to frighten her too) and spoke so bitterly, saying she had
ruined his life. At any rate when she went down to see them at a cottage
near Rickmansworth, things were horribly strained. Paul took her down
the garden to look at the Belgian hares which he bred, and Minta fol-
lowed them, singing, and put her bare arm on his shoulder, lest he
should tell her anything.
Minta was bored by hares, Lily thought. But Minta never gave herself
away. She never said things like that about playing chess in coffee-
houses. She was far too conscious, far too wary. But to go on with their
story—they had got through the dangerous stage by now. She had been
staying with them last summer some time and the car broke down and
Minta had to hand him his tools. He sat on the road mending the car,
and it was the way she gave him the tools—business-like, straightfor-
ward, friendly—that proved it was all right now. They were "in love" no
longer; no, he had taken up with another woman, a serious woman, with
her hair in a plait and a case in her hand (Minta had described her grate-
fully, almost admiringly), who went to meetings and shared Paul's views
(they had got more and more pronounced) about the taxation of land

145
values and a capital levy. Far from breaking up the marriage, that alli-
ance had righted it. They were excellent friends, obviously, as he sat on
the road and she handed him his tools.
So that was the story of the Rayleys, Lily thought. She imagined her-
self telling it to Mrs Ramsay, who would be full of curiosity to know
what had become of the Rayleys. She would feel a little triumphant,
telling Mrs Ramsay that the marriage had not been a success.
But the dead, thought Lily, encountering some obstacle in her design
which made her pause and ponder, stepping back a foot or so, oh, the
dead! she murmured, one pitied them, one brushed them aside, one had
even a little contempt for them. They are at our mercy. Mrs Ramsay has
faded and gone, she thought. We can over-ride her wishes, improve
away her limited, old-fashioned ideas. She recedes further and further
from us. Mockingly she seemed to see her there at the end of the corridor
of years saying, of all incongruous things, "Marry, marry!" (sitting very
upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the
garden outside). And one would have to say to her, It has all gone
against your wishes. They're happy like that; I'm happy like this. Life has
changed completely. At that all her being, even her beauty, became for a
moment, dusty and out of date. For a moment Lily, standing there, with
the sun hot on her back, summing up the Rayleys, triumphed over Mrs
Ramsay, who would never know how Paul went to coffee-houses and
had a mistress; how he sat on the ground and Minta handed him his
tools; how she stood here painting, had never married, not even William
Bankes.
Mrs Ramsay had planned it. Perhaps, had she lived, she would have
compelled it. Already that summer he was "the kindest of men." He was
"the first scientist of his age, my husband says." He was also "poor Willi-
am—it makes me so unhappy, when I go to see him, to find nothing nice
in his house—no one to arrange the flowers." So they were sent for walks
together, and she was told, with that faint touch of irony that made Mrs
Ramsay slip through one's fingers, that she had a scientific mind; she
liked flowers; she was so exact. What was this mania of hers for mar-
riage? Lily wondered, stepping to and fro from her easel.
(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light
seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It
rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a dis-
tant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles
round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated
her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the

146
cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the roar
and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust, as if while she saw its
splendour and power she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the
house, greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for a sight, for a
glory it surpassed everything in her experience, and burnt year after year
like a signal fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had
only to say "in love" and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's fire
again. And it sank and she said to herself, laughing, "The Rayleys"; how
Paul went to coffee-houses and played chess.)
She had only escaped by the skin of her teeth though, she thought. She
had been looking at the table-cloth, and it had flashed upon her that she
would move the tree to the middle, and need never marry anybody, and
she had felt an enormous exultation. She had felt, now she could stand
up to Mrs Ramsay—a tribute to the astonishing power that Mrs Ramsay
had over one. Do this, she said, and one did it. Even her shadow at the
window with James was full of authority. She remembered how William
Bankes had been shocked by her neglect of the significance of mother
and son. Did she not admire their beauty? he said. But William, she re-
membered, had listened to her with his wise child's eyes when she ex-
plained how it was not irreverence: how a light there needed a shadow
there and so on. She did not intend to disparage a subject which, they
agreed, Raphael had treated divinely. She was not cynical. Quite the con-
trary. Thanks to his scientific mind he understood—a proof of disinter-
ested intelligence which had pleased her and comforted her enormously.
One could talk of painting then seriously to a man. Indeed, his friend-
ship had been one of the pleasures of her life. She loved William Bankes.
They went to Hampton Court and he always left her, like the perfect
gentleman he was, plenty of time to wash her hands, while he strolled by
the river. That was typical of their relationship. Many things were left
unsaid. Then they strolled through the courtyards, and admired, sum-
mer after summer, the proportions and the flowers, and he would tell
her things, about perspective, about architecture, as they walked, and he
would stop to look at a tree, or the view over the lake, and admire a
child—(it was his great grief—he had no daughter) in the vague aloof
way that was natural to a man who spent spent so much time in laborat-
ories that the world when he came out seemed to dazzle him, so that he
walked slowly, lifted his hand to screen his eyes and paused, with his
head thrown back, merely to breathe the air. Then he would tell her how
his housekeeper was on her holiday; he must buy a new carpet for the
staircase. Perhaps she would go with him to buy a new carpet for the

147
staircase. And once something led him to talk about the Ramsays and he
had said how when he first saw her she had been wearing a grey hat; she
was not more than nineteen or twenty. She was astonishingly beautiful.
There he stood looking down the avenue at Hampton Court as if he
could see her there among the fountains.
She looked now at the drawing-room step. She saw, through William's
eyes, the shape of a woman, peaceful and silent, with downcast eyes. She
sat musing, pondering (she was in grey that day, Lily thought). Her eyes
were bent. She would never lift them. Yes, thought Lily, looking intently,
I must have seen her look like that, but not in grey; nor so still, nor so
young, nor so peaceful. The figure came readily enough. She was aston-
ishingly beautiful, as William said. But beauty was not everything.
Beauty had this penalty—it came too readily, came too completely. It
stilled life—froze it. One forgot the little agitations; the flush, the pallor,
some queer distortion, some light or shadow, which made the face unre-
cognisable for a moment and yet added a quality one saw for ever after.
It was simpler to smooth that all out under the cover of beauty. But what
was the look she had, Lily wondered, when she clapped her deer-
stalkers's hat on her head, or ran across the grass, or scolded Kennedy,
the gardener? Who could tell her? Who could help her?
Against her will she had come to the surface, and found herself half
out of the picture, looking, little dazedly, as if at unreal things, at Mr
Carmichael. He lay on his chair with his hands clasped above his paunch
not reading, or sleeping, but basking like a creature gorged with exist-
ence. His book had fallen on to the grass.
She wanted to go straight up to him and say, "Mr Carmichael!" Then
he would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green
eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to
them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words
that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life,
about death; about Mrs Ramsay"—no, she thought, one could say noth-
ing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark.
Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one
gave it up; then the idea sunk back again; then one became like most
middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes
and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in
words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She
was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily
empty.) It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. The physical sensa-
tions that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly

148
extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a
hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to
want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and
again! Oh, Mrs Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat
by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to
abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. It
had seemed so safe, thinking of her. Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you
could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had
been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart
thus. Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair in-
side, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of
the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre
of complete emptiness.
"What does it mean? How do you explain it all?" she wanted to say,
turning to Mr Carmichael again. For the whole world seemed to have
dissolved in this early morning hour into a pool of thought, a deep basin
of reality, and one could almost fancy that had Mr Carmichael spoken,
for instance, a little tear would have rent the surface pool. And then? So-
mething would emerge. A hand would be shoved up, a blade would be
flashed. It was nonsense of course.
A curious notion came to her that he did after all hear the things she
could not say. He was an inscrutable old man, with the yellow stain on
his beard, and his poetry, and his puzzles, sailing serenely through a
world which satisfied all his wants, so that she thought he had only to
put down his hand where he lay on the lawn to fish up anything he
wanted. She looked at her picture. That would have been his answer,
presumably—how "you" and "I" and "she" pass and vanish; nothing
stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. Yet it would be hung in the
attics, she thought; it would be rolled up and flung under a sofa; yet
even so, even of a picture like that, it was true. One might say, even of
this scrawl, not of that actual picture, perhaps, but of what it attempted,
that it "remained for ever," she was going to say, or, for the words
spoken sounded even to herself, too boastful, to hint, wordlessly; when,
looking at the picture, she was surprised to find that she could not see it.
Her eyes were full of a hot liquid (she did not think of tears at first)
which, without disturbing the firmness of her lips, made the air thick,
rolled down her cheeks. She had perfect control of herself—Oh, yes!—in
every other way. Was she crying then for Mrs Ramsay, without being
aware of any unhappiness? She addressed old Mr Carmichael again.
What was it then? What did it mean? Could things thrust their hands up

149
and grip one; could the blade cut; the fist grasp? Was there no safety? No
learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all
was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could
it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected,
unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now
on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why
was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human
beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty
would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would
form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return.
"Mrs Ramsay!" she said aloud, "Mrs Ramsay!" The tears ran down her
face.

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Chapter 7
[Macalister's boy took one of the fish and cut a square out of its side to
bait his hook with. The mutilated body (it was alive still) was thrown
back into the sea.]

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Chapter 8
"Mrs Ramsay!" Lily cried, "Mrs Ramsay!" But nothing happened. The
pain increased. That anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecil-
ity, she thought! Anyhow the old man had not heard her. He remained
benignant, calm—if one chose to think it, sublime. Heaven be praised, no
one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop! She had not
obviously taken leave of her senses. No one had seen her step off her
strip of board into the waters of annihilation. She remained a skimpy old
maid, holding a paint-brush.
And now slowly the pain of the want, and the bitter anger (to be called
back, just as she thought she would never feel sorrow for Mrs Ramsay
again. Had she missed her among the coffee cups at breakfast? not in the
least) lessened; and of their anguish left, as antidote, a relief that was
balm in itself, and also, but more mysteriously, a sense of some one
there, of Mrs Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world
had put on her, staying lightly by her side and then (for this was Mrs
Ramsay in all her beauty) raising to her forehead a wreath of white
flowers with which she went. Lily squeezed her tubes again. She at-
tacked that problem of the hedge. It was strange how clearly she saw
her, stepping with her usual quickness across fields among whose folds,
purplish and soft, among whose flowers, hyacinth or lilies, she vanished.
It was some trick of the painter's eye. For days after she had heard of her
death she had seen her thus, putting her wreath to her forehead and go-
ing unquestioningly with her companion, a shade across the fields. The
sight, the phrase, had its power to console. Wherever she happened to
be, painting, here, in the country or in London, the vision would come to
her, and her eyes, half closing, sought something to base her vision on.
She looked down the railway carriage, the omnibus; took a line from
shoulder or cheek; looked at the windows opposite; at Piccadilly, lamp-
strung in the evening. All had been part of the fields of death. But always
something—it might be a face, a voice, a paper boy crying STANDARD,
NEWS—thrust through, snubbed her, waked her, required and got in the
end an effort of attention, so that the vision must be perpetually remade.

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Now again, moved as she was by some instinctive need of distance and
blue, she looked at the bay beneath her, making hillocks of the blue bars
of the waves, and stony fields of the purpler spaces, again she was
roused as usual by something incongruous. There was a brown spot in
the middle of the bay. It was a boat. Yes, she realised that after a second.
But whose boat? Mr Ramsay's boat, she replied. Mr Ramsay; the man
who had marched past her, with his hand raised, aloof, at the head of a
procession, in his beautiful boots, asking her for sympathy, which she
had refused. The boat was now half way across the bay.
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that
the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the
sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. A steamer far out at
sea had drawn in the air a great scroll of smoke which stayed there
curving and circling decoratively, as if the air were a fine gauze which
held things and kept them softly in its mesh, only gently swaying them
this way and that. And as happens sometimes when the weather is very
fine, the cliffs looked as if they were conscious of the ships, and the ships
looked as if they were conscious of the cliffs, as if they signalled to each
other some message of their own. For sometimes quite close to the shore,
the Lighthouse looked this morning in the haze an enormous distance
away.
"Where are they now?" Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he,
that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown pa-
per parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.

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Chapter 9
They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore, which,
rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more peaceful. Her
hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green swirls and streaks
into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in imagination in
that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in clusters to white
sprays, where in the green light a change came over one's entire mind
and one's body shone half transparent enveloped in a green cloak.
Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water
ceased; the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds.
One heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat
as if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to
one. For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had be-
come to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they
came to a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles
from shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world
seemed to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of
the distant shore became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody
seemed to come very close together and to feel each other's presence,
which they had almost forgotten. Macalister's fishing line went plumb
down into the sea. But Mr Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled
under him.
He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover's
egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned a
page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar gesture
aimed at him; now assertively, now commandingly; now with the inten-
tion of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father read and
turned one after another of those little pages, James kept dreading the
moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him about
something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would de-
mand, or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does, James
thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.

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 He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his
father to the heart. Only now, as he grew older, and sat staring at his
father in an impotent rage, it was not him, that old man reading, whom
he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that descended on him—without
his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its
talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you (he
could feel the beak on his bare legs, where it had struck when he was a
child) and then made off, and there he was again, an old man, very sad,
reading his book. That he would kill, that he would strike to the heart.
Whatever he did—(and he might do anything, he felt, looking at the
Lighthouse and the distant shore) whether he was in a business, in a
bank, a barrister, a man at the head of some enterprise, that he would
fight, that he would track down and stamp out—tyranny, despotism, he
called it—making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off
their right to speak. How could any of them say, But I won't, when he
said, Come to the Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings
spread, and the hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat
reading his book; and he might look up—one never knew—quite reason-
ably. He might talk to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign
into some frozen old woman's hand in the street, James thought, and he
might be shouting out at some fisherman's sports; he might be waving
his arms in the air with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the
table dead silent from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James,
while the boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a
waste of snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come
to feel, quite often lately, when his father said something or did
something which surprised the others, there were two pairs of footprints
only; his own and his father's. They alone knew each other. What then
was this terror, this hatred? Turning back among the many leaves which
the past had folded in him, peering into the heart of that forest where
light and shade so chequer each other that all shape is distorted, and one
blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes, now with a dark shadow, he
sought an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a con-
crete shape. Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a perambulat-
or, or on some one's knee, he had seen a waggon crush ignorantly and
innocently, some one's foot? Suppose he had seen the foot first, in the
grass, smooth, and whole; then the wheel; and the same foot, purple,
crushed. But the wheel was innocent. So now, when his father came
striding down the passage knocking them up early in the morning to go

155
to the Lighthouse down it came over his foot, over Cam's foot, over
anybody's foot. One sat and watched it.
But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this
happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there;
flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set itself in a
garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this throwing of
hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice. They went in
and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in the kitchen;
and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all was blowing, all
was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and tall brandishing
red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would be drawn, like a
vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker at night. But the leaf-
like veil was so fine, that lights lifted it, voices crinkled it; he could see
through it a figure stooping, hear, coming close, going away, some dress
rustling, some chain tinkling.
It was in this world that the wheel went over the person's foot. So-
mething, he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air, something arid
and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting through
the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it shrivel
and fall.
"It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You won't be able to
go to the Lighthouse."
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow
eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now—
James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks;
the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with black
and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing spread
on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?
No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one
thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to be
seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye open-
ing and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy sunny
garden where they sat.
But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said "they" or "a person," and
then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some one
going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence of whoever might
be in the room. It was his father now. The strain was acute. For in one
moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the covers of his
book together, and say: "What's happening now? What are we dawdling
about here for, eh?" as, once before he had brought his blade down

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among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all over, and if there
had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp point he would
have seized it and struck his father through the heart. She had gone stiff
all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he felt she listened to him
no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away and left him there, im-
potent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a pair of scissors.
Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled and gurgled in the bot-
tom of the boat where three or four mackerel beat their tails up and
down in a pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At any moment
Mr Ramsay (he scarcely dared look at him) might rouse himself, shut his
book, and say something sharp; but for the moment he was reading, so
that James stealthily, as if he were stealing downstairs on bare feet,
afraid of waking a watchdog by a creaking board, went on thinking what
was she like, where did she go that day? He began following her from
room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as if
the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody; he
listened to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply whatever
came into her head. She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he
speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, per-
haps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one's
head. But all the time he thought of her, he was conscious of his father
following his thought, surveying it, making it shiver and falter. At last he
ceased to think.
There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the Light-
house, powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains of misery
which settled on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to bind him
there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape by taking a
knife and plunging it… But at that moment the sail swung slowly round,
filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake herself, and then to move off
half conscious in her sleep, and then she woke and shot through the
waves. The relief was extraordinary. They all seemed to fall away from
each other again and to be at their ease, and the fishing-lines slanted taut
across the side of the boat. But his father did not rouse himself. He only
raised his right hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his
knee again as if he were conducting some secret symphony.

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Chapter 10
[The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing and
looking out over the bay. The sea stretched like silk across the bay.
Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up in it,
she felt, they were gone for ever, they had become part of the nature of
things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself had vanished,
but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and drooped like a flag
mournfully in valediction.]

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Chapter 11
It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing her
fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea before.
It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle and two sharp
crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for miles and miles
on either side of the island. It was very small; shaped something like a
leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat, she thought, beginning to tell
herself a story of adventure about escaping from a sinking ship. But with
the sea streaming through her fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing be-
hind them, she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the
sense of adventure and escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as
the boat sailed on, how her father's anger about the points of the com-
pass, James's obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had
slipped, all had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next?
Where were they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea,
there spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the ad-
venture (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And the
drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell here
and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of a
world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and there,
a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, and
shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold- sprinkled
waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the uni-
verse—even that little island? The old gentlemen in the study she
thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from the garden
purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be Mr Carmi-
chael or Mr Bankes who was sitting with her father) sitting opposite each
other in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in front of them the
pages of THE TIMES, when she came in from the garden, all in a
muddle, about something some one had said about Christ, or hearing
that a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or wondering
what Napoleon was like. Then they took all this with their clean hands
(they wore grey-coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and they

159
brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees, and
said something now and then very brief. Just to please herself she would
take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father write, so
equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with a little
cough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old gentle-
man opposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open, one
could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water; and if it
did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and THE TIMES crack-
ling then it was right. And watching her father as he wrote in his study,
she thought (now sitting in the boat) he was not vain, nor a tyrant and
did not wish to make you pity him. Indeed, if he saw she was there,
reading a book, he would ask her, as gently as any one could, Was there
nothing he could give her?
Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book
with the shiny cover mottled like a plover's egg. No; it was right. Look at
him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But James had his eye on
the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings the talk
round to himself and his books, James would say. He is intolerably egot-
istical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she said, looking at him.
Look at him now. She looked at him reading the little book with his legs
curled; the little book whose yellowish pages she knew, without know-
ing what was written on them. It was small; it was closely printed; on the
fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he had spent fifteen francs on din-
ner; the wine had been so much; he had given so much to the waiter; all
was added up neatly at the bottom of the page. But what might be writ-
ten in the book which had rounded its edges off in his pocket, she did
not know. What he thought they none of them knew. But he was ab-
sorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as he did now for an instant, it
was not to see anything; it was to pin down some thought more exactly.
That done, his mind flew back again and he plunged into his reading. He
read, she thought, as if he were guiding something, or wheedling a large
flock of sheep, or pushing his way up and up a single narrow path; and
sometimes he went fast and straight, and broke his way through the
bramble, and sometimes it seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble
blinded him, but he was not going to let himself be beaten by that; on he
went, tossing over page after page. And she went on telling herself a
story about escaping from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat
there; safe, as she felt herself when she crept in from the garden, and
took a book down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper suddenly,

160
said something very brief over the top of it about the character of
Napoleon.
She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its
sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more im-
portant now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and
sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had
sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each
alone.

161
Chapter 12
So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which
had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds
seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance:
whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling for Mr Ramsay
changed as he sailed further and further across the bay. It seemed to be
elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and more remote.
He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that blue, that dis-
tance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr Carmichael suddenly
grunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from the grass. He settled
into his chair again puffing and blowing like some sea monster. That was
different altogether, because he was so near. And now again all was
quiet. They must be out of bed by this time, she supposed, looking at the
house, but nothing appeared there. But then, she remembered, they had
always made off directly a meal was over, on business of their own. It
was all in keeping with this silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of
the early morning hour. It was a way things had sometimes, she thought,
lingering for a moment and looking at the long glittering windows and
the plume of blue smoke: they became illness, before habits had spun
themselves across the surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so
startling; felt something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be
at one's ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn
to greet old Mrs Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to
sit in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you go-
ing to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do let me
find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need not speak at
all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good deal of move-
ment in the bay, boats were starting off) between things, beyond things.
Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to be standing up to
the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these
waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives.
The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things
besides. A washer-woman with her basket; a rook, a red-hot poker; the

162
purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held
the whole together.
It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years
ago, standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she
must be in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might
be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place
them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of
some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of
those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love
plays.
Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr Ramsay's sailing boat. They
would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the wind
had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed
slightly and the boats altered their positions, the view, which a moment
before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory. The
wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something displeas-
ing about the placing of the ships.
The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own
mind. She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to
her picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she
could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite
forces; Mr Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was
something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that
the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees was
too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when she
began, that she had solved her problem?
What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something tht
evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs Ramsay; it evaded
her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came.
Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold of
was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made
anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh; she said des-
perately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel. It was a miserable
machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for
painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment;
heroically, one must force it on. She stared, frowning. There was the
hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by soliciting urgently. One got
only a glare in the eye from looking at the line of the wall, or from think-
ing—she wore a grey hat. She was astonishingly beautiful. Let it come,
she thought, if it will come. For there are moments when one can neither

163
think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where
is one?
Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought, sitting down, and ex-
amining with her brush a little colony of plantains. For the lawn was
very rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not
shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was hap-
pening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even
though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he
must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that
woman at work in the fields, again. The lawn was the world; they were
up here together, on this exalted station, she thought, looking at old Mr
Carmichael, who seemed (though they had not said a word all this time)
to share her thoughts. And she would never see him again perhaps. He
was growing old. Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper that
dangled from his foot, he was growing famous. People said that his po-
etry was "so beautiful." They went and published things he had written
forty years ago. There was a famous man now called Carmichael, she
smiled, thinking how many shapes one person might wear, how he was
that in the newspapers, but here the same as he had always been. He
looked the same—greyer, rather. Yes, he looked the same, but somebody
had said, she recalled, that when he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's
death (he was killed in a second by a shell; he should have been a great
mathematician) Mr Carmichael had "lost all interest in life." What did it
mean—that? she wondered. Had he marched through Trafalgar Square
grasping a big stick? Had he turned pages over and over, without read-
ing them, sitting in his room in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know
what he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it
in him all the same. They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they
looked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But this
was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not
the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running
purple down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She
knew that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his po-
etry. She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonor-
ously. It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert and the
camel. It was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely imper-
sonal; it said something about death; it said very little about love. There
was an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other people.
Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-room
window with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs

164
Ramsay whom for some reason he did not much like? On that account,
of course, she would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her.
He would halt unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did
not want anything of her, Mrs Ramsay would ask him (Lily could hear
her) wouldn't he like a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing.
(Here he bowed.) There was some quality in her which he did not much
like. It was perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, something
matter-of-fact in her. She was so direct.
(A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window—the squeak
of a hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)
There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily
thought (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty, but it
had no effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs Ramsay
now.)—People who thought her too sure, too drastic.
Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, they
would say, and the same always! They preferred another type—the dark,
the vivacious. Then she was weak with her husband. She let him make
those scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what had
happened to her. And (to go back to Mr Carmichael and his dislike) one
could not imagine Mrs Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole
morning on the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the
only token of her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to
the poor, to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had
seen her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, with
her basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She had
thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups), half
moved (her beauty took one's breath away), eyes that are closing in pain
have looked on you. You have been with them there.
And then Mrs Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late,
or the butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was
saying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of Greek
temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy little
room. She never talked of it—she went, punctually, directly. It was her
instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the artichokes
for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race, making her nest in
its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a little distressing to people who
did not share it; to Mr Carmichael perhaps, to herself certainly. Some no-
tion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness of action, the suprem-
acy of thought. Her going was a reproach to them, gave a different twist
to the world, so that they were led to protest, seeing their own

165
prepossessions disappear, and clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley
did that too: it was part of the reason why one disliked him. He upset the
proportions of one's world. And what had happened to him, she
wondered, idly stirring the platains with her brush. He had got his fel-
lowship. He had married; he lived at Golder's Green.
She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the
war. He was denouncing something: he was condemning somebody. He
was preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how could he love his
kind who did not know one picture from another, who had stood behind
her smoking shag ("fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe") and making it his
business to tell her women can't write, women can't paint, not so much
that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it? There he
was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform (there
were ants crawling about among the plantains which she disturbed with
her brush—red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like Charles Tansley). She
had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall, pump-
ing love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old cask or
whatever it was bobbing up and down among the waves and Mrs Ram-
say looking for her spectacle case among the pebbles. "Oh, dear! What a
nuisance! Lost again. Don't bother, Mr Tansley. I lose thousands every
summer," at which he pressed his chin back against his collar, as if afraid
to sanction such exaggeration, but could stand it in her whom he liked,
and smiled very charmingly. He must have confided in her on one of
those long expeditions when people got separated and walked back
alone. He was educating his little sister, Mrs Ramsay had told her. It was
immensely to his credit. Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew
well, stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one's notions of other
people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's
own. He did for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagel-
lating his lean flanks when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be
serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs Ramsay's sayings, to
look at him through her eyes.
She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced
them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony.
Some ran this way, others that.
One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of
eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.
Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One
wanted most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through
keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting silent

166
in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like the air
which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her imaginations, her
desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did the garden mean to
her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke? (Lily looked up, as she
had seen Mrs Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave falling on the
beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her mind when the chil-
dren cried, "How's that? How's that?" cricketing? She would stop knit-
ting for a second. She would look intent. Then she would lapse again,
and suddenly Mr Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in front of her and
some curious shock passed through her and seemed to rock her in pro-
found agitation on its breast when stopping there he stood over her and
looked down at her. Lily could see him.
He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed
somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same
way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some is-
land, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on shore by the
gentlemen. An old-fashioned scene that was, which required, very
nearly, crinolines and peg-top trousers. Letting herself be helped by him,
Mrs Ramsay had thought (Lily supposed) the time has come now. Yes,
she would say it now. Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped
slowly, quietly on shore. Probably she said one word only, letting her
hand rest still in his. I will marry you, she might have said, with her
hand in his; but no more. Time after time the same thrill had passed
between them—obviously it had, Lily thought, smoothing a way for her
ants. She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out
something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had
seen. For in the rough and tumble of daily life, with all those children
about, all those visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition—of one
thing falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which
chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.
But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked off
together, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their relationship.
It was no monotony of bliss—she with her impulses and quicknesses; he
with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no. The bedroom door would slam
violently early in the morning. He would start from the table in a temper.
He would whizz his plate through the window. Then all through the
house there would be a sense of doors slamming and blinds fluttering, as
if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded about trying in a
hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship- shape. She had met
Paul Rayley like that one day on the stairs. They had laughed and

167
laughed, like a couple of children, all because Mr Ramsay, finding an
earwig in his milk at breakfast had sent the whole thing flying through
the air on to the terrace outside. 'An earwig, Prue murmured, awestruck,
'in his milk.' Other people might find centipedes. But he had built round
him such a fence of sanctity, and occupied the space with such a de-
meanour of majesty that an earwig in his milk was a monster.
But it tired Mrs Ramsay, it cowed her a little—the plates whizzing and
the doors slamming. And there would fall between them sometimes long
rigid silences, when, in a state of mind which annoyed Lily in her, half
plaintive, half resentful, she seemed unable to surmount the tempest
calmly, or to laugh as they laughed, but in her weariness perhaps con-
cealed something. She brooded and sat silent. After a time he would
hang stealthily about the places where she was—roaming under the win-
dow where she sat writing letters or talking, for she would take care to
be busy when he passed, and evade him, and pretend not to see him.
Then he would turn smooth as silk, affable, urbane, and try to win her
so. Still she would hold off, and now she would assert for a brief season
some of those prides and airs the due of her beauty which she was gen-
erally utterly without; would turn her head; would look so, over her
shoulder, always with some Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side.
At length, standing outside the group the very figure of a famished wolf-
hound (Lily got up off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the
window, where she had seen him), he would say her name, once only,
for all the world like a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back;
and he would say it once more, and this time something in the tone
would rouse her, and she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden,
and they would walk off together among the pear trees, the cabbages,
and the raspberry beds. They would have it out together. But with what
attitudes and with what words? Such a dignity was theirs in this rela-
tionship that, turning away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their
curiosity and their discomfort, and begin picking flowers, throwing balls,
chattering, until it was time for dinner, and there they were, he at one
end of the table, she at the other, as usual.
"Why don't some of you take up botany?.. With all those legs and arms
why doesn't one of you… ?" So they would talk as usual, laughing,
among the children. All would be as usual, save only for some quiver, as
of a blade in the air, which came and went between them as if the usual
sight of the children sitting round their soup plates had freshened itself
in their eyes after that hour among the pears and the cabbages. Espe-
cially, Lily thought, Mrs Ramsay would glance at Prue. She sat in the

168
middle between brothers and sisters, always occupied, it seemed, seeing
that nothing went wrong so that she scarcely spoke herself. How Prue
must have blamed herself for that earwig in the milk How white she had
gone when Mr Ramsay threw his plate through the window! How she
drooped under those long silences between them! Anyhow, her mother
now would seem to be making it up to her; assuring her that everything
was well; promising her that one of these days that same happiness
would be hers. She had enjoyed it for less than a year, however.
She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, screwing up
her eyes and standing back as if to look at her picture, which she was not
touching, however, with all her faculties in a trance, frozen over superfi-
cially but moving underneath with extreme speed.
She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on
to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or
complaint—had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?—went
too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn—that was how she
would have painted it. The hills were austere. It was rocky; it was steep.
The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They went, the three
of them together, Mrs Ramsay walking rather fast in front, as if she ex-
pected to meet some one round the corner.
Suddenly the window at which she was looking was whitened by
some light stuff behind it. At last then somebody had come into the
drawing-room; somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven's sake, she
prayed, let them sit still there and not come floundering out to talk to
her. Mercifully, whoever it was stayed still inside; had settled by some
stroke of luck so as to throw an odd-shaped triangular shadow over the
step. It altered the composition of the picture a little. It was interesting. It
might be useful. Her mood was coming back to her. One must keep on
looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the de-
termination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the
scene—so—in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted,
she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordin-
ary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the
same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy. The problem might be solved
after all. Ah, but what had happened? Some wave of white went over the
window pane. The air must have stirred some flounce in the room. Her
heart leapt at her and seized her and tortured her.
"Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!" she cried, feeling the old horror come
back—to want and want and not to have. Could she inflict that still? And
then, quietly, as if she refrained, that too became part of ordinary

169
experience, was on a level with the chair, with the table. Mrs Ramsay—it
was part of her perfect goodness—sat there quite simply, in the chair,
flicked her needles to and fro, knitted her reddish-brown stocking, cast
her shadow on the step. There she sat.
And as if she had something she must share, yet could hardly leave
her easel, so full her mind was of what she was thinking, of what she
was seeing, Lily went past Mr Carmichael holding her brush to the edge
of the lawn. Where was that boat now? And Mr Ramsay? She wanted
him.

170
Chapter 13
Mr Ramsay had almost done reading. One hand hovered over the page
as if to be in readiness to turn it the very instant he had finished it. He sat
there bareheaded with the wind blowing his hair about, extraordinarily
exposed to everything. He looked very old. He looked, James thought,
getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of
waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the
sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the
back of both of their minds—that loneliness which was for both of them
the truth about things.
He was reading very quickly, as if he were eager to get to the end.
Indeed they were very close to the Lighthouse now. There it loomed up,
stark and straight, glaring white and black, and one could see the waves
breaking in white splinters like smashed glass upon the rocks. One could
see lines and creases in the rocks. One could see the windows clearly; a
dab of white on one of them, and a little tuft of green on the rock. A man
had come out and looked at them through a glass and gone in again. So
it was like that, James thought, the Lighthouse one had seen across the
bay all these years; it was a stark tower on a bare rock. It satisfied him. It
confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character. The old
ladies, he thought, thinking of the garden at home, went dragging their
chairs about on the lawn. Old Mrs Beckwith, for example, was always
saying how nice it was and how sweet it was and how they ought to be
so proud and they ought to be so happy, but as a matter of fact, James
thought, looking at the Lighthouse stood there on its rock, it's like that.
He looked at his father reading fiercely with his legs curled tight. They
shared that knowledge. "We are driving before a gale—we must sink," he
began saying to himself, half aloud, exactly as his father said it.
Nobody seemed to have spoken for an age. Cam was tired of looking
at the sea. Little bits of black cork had floated past; the fish were dead in
the bottom of the boat. Still her father read, and James looked at him and
she looked at him, and they vowed that they would fight tyranny to the
death, and he went on reading quite unconscious of what they thought.

171
It was thus that he escaped, she thought. Yes, with his great forehead
and his great nose, holding his little mottled book firmly in front of him,
he escaped. You might try to lay hands on him, but then like a bird, he
spread his wings, he floated off to settle out of your reach somewhere far
away on some desolate stump. She gazed at the immense expanse of the
sea. The island had grown so small that it scarcely looked like a leaf any
longer. It looked like the top of a rock which some wave bigger than the
rest would cover. Yet in its frailty were all those paths, those terraces,
those bedrooms— all those innumberable things. But as, just before
sleep, things simplify themselves so that only one of all the myriad de-
tails has power to assert itself, so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island,
all those paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and disappear-
ing, and nothing was left but a pale blue censer swinging rhythmically
this way and that across her mind. It was a hanging garden; it was a val-
ley, full of birds, and flowers, and antelopes… She was falling asleep.
"Come now," said Mr Ramsay, suddenly shutting his book.
Come where? To what extraordinary adventure? She woke with a
start. To land somewhere, to climb somewhere? Where was he leading
them? For after his immense silence the words startled them. But it was
absurd. He was hungry, he said. It was time for lunch. Besides, look, he
said. "There's the Lighthouse. We're almost there."
"He's doing very well," said Macalister, praising James. "He's keeping
her very steady."
But his father never praised him, James thought grimly.
Mr Ramsay opened the parcel and shared out the sandwiches among
them. Now he was happy, eating bread and cheese with these fishermen.
He would have liked to live in a cottage and lounge about in the harbour
spitting with the other old men, James thought, watching him slice his
cheese into thin yellow sheets with his penknife.
This is right, this is it, Cam kept feeling, as she peeled her hard- boiled
egg. Now she felt as she did in the study when the old men were reading
THE TIMES. Now I can go on thinking whatever I like, and I shan't fall
over a precipice or be drowned, for there he is, keeping his eye on me,
she thought.
At the same time they were sailing so fast along by the rocks that it
was very exciting—it seemed as if they were doing two things at once;
they were eating their lunch here in the sun and they were also making
for safety in a great storm after a shipwreck. Would the water last?
Would the provisions last? she asked herself, telling herself a story but
knowing at the same time what was the truth.

172
 They would soon be out of it, Mr Ramsay was saying to old Macal-
ister; but their children would see some strange things. Macalister said
he was seventy-five last March; Mr Ramsay was seventy-one. Macalister
said he had never seen a doctor; he had never lost a tooth. And that's the
way I'd like my children to live—Cam was sure that her father was
thinking that, for he stopped her throwing a sandwich into the sea and
told her, as if he were thinking of the fishermen and how they lived, that
if she did not want it she should put it back in the parcel. She should not
waste it. He said it so wisely, as if he knew so well all the things that
happened in the world that she put it back at once, and then he gave her,
from his own parcel, a gingerbread nut, as if he were a great Spanish
gentleman, she thought, handing a flower to a lady at a window (so
courteous his manner was). He was shabby, and simple, eating bread
and cheese; and yet he was leading them on a great expedition where,
for all she knew, they would be drowned.
"That was where she sunk," said Macalister's boy suddenly.
Three men were drowned where we are now, the old man said. He
had seen them clinging to the mast himself. And Mr Ramsay taking a
look at the spot was about, James and Cam were afraid, to burst out:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
and if he did, they could not bear it; they would shriek aloud; they
could not endure another explosion of the passion that boiled in him; but
to their surprise all he said was "Ah" as if he thought to himself. But why
make a fuss about that? Naturally men are drowned in a storm, but it is a
perfectly straightforward affair, and the depths of the sea (he sprinkled
the crumbs from his sandwich paper over them) are only water after all.
Then having lighted his pipe he took out his watch. He looked at it at-
tentively; he made, perhaps, some mathematical calculation. At last he
said, triumphantly:
"Well done!" James had steered them like a born sailor.
There! Cam thought, addressing herself silently to James. You've got it
at last. For she knew that this was what James had been wanting, and
she knew that now he had got it he was so pleased that he would not
look at her or at his father or at any one. There he sat with his hand on
the tiller sitting bolt upright, looking rather sulky and frowning slightly.
He was so pleased that he was not going to let anybody share a grain of
his pleasure. His father had praised him. They must think that he was
perfectly indifferent. But you've got it now, Cam thought.
They had tacked, and they were sailing swiftly, buoyantly on long
rocking waves which handed them on from one to another with an

173
extraordinary lilt and exhilaration beside the reef. On the left a row of
rocks showed brown through the water which thinned and became
greener and on one, a higher rock, a wave incessantly broke and spurted
a little column of drops which fell down in a shower. One could hear the
slap of the water and the patter of falling drops and a kind of hushing
and hissing sound from the waves rolling and gambolling and slapping
the rocks as if they were wild creatures who were perfectly free and
tossed and tumbled and sported like this for ever.
Now they could see two men on the Lighthouse, watching them and
making ready to meet them.
Mr Ramsay buttoned his coat, and turned up his trousers. He took the
large, badly packed, brown paper parcel which Nancy had got ready and
sat with it on his knee. Thus in complete readiness to land he sat looking
back at the island. With his long-sighted eyes perhaps he could see the
dwindled leaf-like shape standing on end on a plate of gold quite clearly.
What could he see? Cam wondered. It was all a blur to her. What was he
thinking now? she wondered. What was it he sought, so fixedly, so in-
tently, so silently? They watched him, both of them, sitting bareheaded
with his parcel on his knee staring and staring at the frail blue shape
which seemed like the vapour of something that had burnt itself away.
What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say,
Ask us anything and we will give it you. But he did not ask them any-
thing. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We per-
ished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it. I have
found it; but he said nothing.
Then he put on his hat.
"Bring those parcels," he said, nodding his head at the things Nancy
had done up for them to take to the Lighthouse. "The parcels for the
Lighthouse men," he said. He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very
straight and tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying,
"There is no God," and Cam thought, as if he were leaping into space,
and they both rose to follow him as he sprang, lightly like a young man,
holding his parcel, on to the rock.

174
Chapter 14
"He must have reached it," said Lily Briscoe aloud, feeling suddenly
completely tired out. For the Lighthouse had become almost invisible,
had melted away into a blue haze, and the effort of looking at it and the
effort of thinking of him landing there, which both seemed to be one and
the same effort, had stretched her body and mind to the utmost. Ah, but
she was relieved. Whatever she had wanted to give him, when he left her
that morning, she had given him at last.
"He has landed," she said aloud. "It is finished." Then, surging up,
puffing slightly, old Mr Carmichael stood beside her, looking like an old
pagan god, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was only a
French novel) in his hand. He stood by her on the edge of the lawn,
swaying a little in his bulk and said, shading his eyes with his hand:
"They will have landed," and she felt that she had been right. They had
not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had
answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there as if he
were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of man-
kind; she thought he was surveying, tolerantly and compassionately,
their final destiny. Now he has crowned the occasion, she thought, when
his hand slowly fell, as if she had seen him let fall from his great height a
wreath of violets and asphodels which, fluttering slowly, lay at length
upon the earth.
Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to
her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues,
its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be
hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that
matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the
steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a
sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there,
in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down
her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

175
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