Lighthouse

A. V. Woolf

" 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 separate 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 catalogue of the Army
and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator,
as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was
fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower,
the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening

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 image 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 scissors 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, or a poker, 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 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 accuracy of judgement. What he
said was true. It was always true. He was incapable

of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered

a disagreeable 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 passage 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, impatiently.
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 disappointed; 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 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 reasons
she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour,
for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled
India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude
towards herself which no woman could fail to feel
or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike,
reverential; which an old woman 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
England 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 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 undoubtedly
the " ablest fellow in Balliol, " who had buried
his light temporarily 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 Tansley, 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 complained 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 other 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
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, some half
grudgingly, half 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 charmingly, 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, elucidating the
social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her,

standing there, holding 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 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 whatsoever, 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 suggested,
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 somnolence which embraced
them all, without need of words, in a vast
and benevolent 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 unfortunate
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. Ramsay 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 better pleased with himself than
he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they
taken a cab, for example, to have paid for it. 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 blues, beautifully smooth, until half
the wall was covered with the advertisement 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 circus. " 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 hospitality " (those were his
parched stiff words) at college. He had to make
things last twice the time other people did; he
smoked the cheapest tobacco; 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... dissertation
... 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

circus, 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 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 country,
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 yellow 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 himself, and everything he had
ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully
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 impatiently; 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 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 violets -- 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 took 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 extraordinary 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 cyclamen and the violets
for he was walking with a beautiful woman. He had
hold of her bag.

" No going to the Lighthouse, James, " he said, as

he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but
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?

" 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 passion 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, irregularly
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 remorselessly

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 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 apprehensively 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 picture. 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.

Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming

down upon her with his hands waving shouting
out, " Boldly we rode and well, " but, mercifully, 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 divined, 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, parting 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

scrupulous 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, presumably,
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. " c

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 immediately
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
thousand 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 control 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, looking 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 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 stagnant on
dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of
physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the
bay with blue, and the heart expanded 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 behind 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 sailing 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 picture, after this
swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes
far away, and instead of merriment felt come over
them some sadness -- because the thing was completed
partly, and partly because distant 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 remembered (and this
must refer to some actual incident), by a hen,
straddling her wings out in protection of a covey
of little chicks, upon which Ramsay, stopping,
pointed his stick and said " Pretty -- pretty, " an odd

illumination in to his heart, Bankes had thought

it, which showed his simplicity, 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 maintained 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 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 order 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 understand
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
favourite. 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 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, to look at a picture of Vesuvius
in 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
astonishing 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 definite 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 ponderous
avalanche all she felt about him. That was one
sensation. Then up 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 undeniable,
everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the
fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were
irrevocably fixed there for eternity. 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, symbol 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!! "
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 discovery 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 uneasily 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.

" 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 another
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 cherished? -- 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 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 believed 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, taking
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 Scotland
can mend a bolt, things must spoil. 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, except 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 recolection -- 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.

" 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, perhaps a tear
formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and
that, received 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 lover, 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 intimacy 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 falsified. Her singleness of mind made her
drop plumb like a stone, alight exact 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 very clearly Greek, straight,
blue-eyed. 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. He would catch the 10:30 at Euston.

" Yet 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 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 absurdly 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 moment before,
raised his head, and kissed her little boy on the
forehead. " Let us find another picture to cut out, "
she said.

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 revealed 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 delight 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 window 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.

" 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 rend
the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so
brutally, 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, another 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 security
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
walloping off so that the water in the tank washes
from side to side, he dived into the evening air
which, already thinner, was taking the substance
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
seeking, 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 053
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 would

be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels
in at Q. Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate.
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.

Qualities that would have saved a ship's

company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits
and a flask of water -- endurance and justice,
foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. then
-- what is R?

A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard,

flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured
the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard
people saying -- he was a failure -- that
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 equanimity 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 letters
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 dying 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, 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 before 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?

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, commanding
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 only here, but all over the world.
Flashing her needles, confident, upright, 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 scimitar of the male,
which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding
sympathy.

<P 60>
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 surround 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
<P 61>
whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that
she had only strength enough to move her finger, in
exquisite abandonment 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 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
<P 62>
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 diminished
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 Carmichael 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;
<P 63>
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
moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the
wake of her exaltation, that Mr Carmichael shuffled
past, in his yellow slippers, and some demon in
her made it necessary for her to call out, as he
passed,
" Going indoors Mr Carmichael? "

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 tiresomeness of an old man with nothing
<P 64>
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 becoming,
as it did so seldom, present to her) after
all, she had not generally any difficulty in making
people like her; for instance, George Manning; 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,
<P 65>
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 entered rooms where mourners sat. Tears
had flown in her presence. Men, and women too, letting
go to the multiplicity of things, had allowed 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
husband; the sense she had now when Mr Carmichael
shuffled past, just nodding to her question,
with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers,
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. Ramsay! 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 approved; 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 civilisation depend 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 civilisation?
Possibly not. Possibly the greatest good
requires the existence 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 argue 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 express 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
dismounted, 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, he
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 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 compared 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 tributes that
reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton,
Kidderminster, 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.

TC
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 refusing 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 Ramsay 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
repeated. 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 tyrannical,
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 became 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 sang through them. And, what was even
more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr.
Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs.
Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud
moving and the tree bending, 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 criticising Mrs. Ramsay,
how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed,
or words to that effect, when Mr. Bankes made it
entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture.
For such it was considering 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 never excited the loves of dozens of
young men). It was love, she thought, pretending to
move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that
never attempted 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. Ramsay (she
glanced at him musing) was helpful, was exalting.
She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of

old rag, menially, on purpose. 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 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 colour 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. Ramsay. 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 lovliest 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 indisputably? 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 insignificant 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 always 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. Ramsay had
had her share of those), and here she saddened,
darkened, and 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, gathering 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, serious. She had recovered her
sense of her now -- this was the glove's twisted 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 wilfulness 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 deceptiveness 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, inextricably the same, one with the object
one adored? Could the body 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 inscriptions
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

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

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 arrow, 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 engrossed, 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 woman 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 decided, rightly, Mrs.
Ramsay thought (and she was very, very fond of
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. It must have happened, one way or
the other, by now.

But she read, " Next morning the wife awoke first,
and it was just daybreak, 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
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,

coming back from some party, she had made to
amuse her husband. Dear, dear, Mrs. Ramsay said
to herself, how did they produce this incongruous
daughter? this tomboy Minta, with a hole in her
stocking? How did she exist in that portentous
atmosphere where the maid was always removing in
a dust-pan the sand that the parrot had scattered,
and conversation 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
conversation, 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
dominate, 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 passionately, 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.
 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 admitted that his gift for mathematics was
extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, 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 happiest 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 teaset made Cam happy for days.
She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor
above her head the moment 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
raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit
of rubbish -- 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 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 always 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,
brandishing 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
qualities (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 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
basket. 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 Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will
remember that all his life.

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 stability. Not as oneself did one
find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished
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

oneself to one thing especially of the things one
saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her
stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking,
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
existence 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 inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers;
felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt
they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational
tenderness 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, annoyed
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 husband
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 irritable -- he was
touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse.
He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its
darkness.

Always, Mrs. Ramsay felt, one helped oneself

out of solitude reluctantly 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 moment. 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.
 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. Ramsay. 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 happened if she sent bulbs down; did
Kennedy plant them? It was his incurable 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 Camilla 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 carlessly 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
uncomfortable, 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 reminded 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 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 Carmichael. 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 children -- 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 children. 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 usual.
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.

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,

intimating 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 molehills
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
almost) 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 Evening 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 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!

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, perhaps it was better not to see pictures:
they only made one hopelessly discontented 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 Darwin 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 compliments (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 Mrs. Ramsay was
wearing a green shawl, and they were standing close
together watching Prue and Jasper throwing catches.
And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at
all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or
ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them
symbolical, making them representative, came upon
them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking,

the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then,

after an instant, the symbolical outline which
transcended 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 ethereal 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 condition 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? "

(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:

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 celebrated
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 millions 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 leviathan (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, crouching over the pool, she brooded.

And Andrew shouted that the sea was coming in,

so she leapt splashing 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 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 emotions,
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 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, following 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 awfully 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 heavens, he said to
himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a
fool of myself..)

" Yes, " said Prue, in her considering way,

answering her mother's question, " I think Nancy
did go with them. "

Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay

supposed, wondering, 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
irrationally, 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 sitting 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 inconsiderate 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 masterpiece -- B$oeuf en Daube. Everything
depended upon things being served up to the precise
moment they were ready. The beef, the bayleaf, and
the wine -- all must be done to a turn. To keep it
waiting was out of the question. Yet of course tonight,
of all nights, out they went, and they came in late,
and things had to be sent out , things had
to be kept hot; the B$oeuf 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
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 disreputable 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 movement of the wings beating
out, out, out -- she could never describe 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 proportion 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 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 rebuked, 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

another 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 begin 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 B$oeuf 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.

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
husband, 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
fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a
weak flame with a newspaper. And so then, she
concluded, addressing herself by bending silently 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 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 remote. 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 herself. 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 precisely in the middle of view), he
were determined to make sure of his meals. Everything
about him had that meagre fixity, that bare
unloveliness. 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 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

people wanted him to talk. He was not going to be
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 anything 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 civilisation impossible
with all their " charm, " all their silliness.

" No going to the Lighthouse tomorrow, Mrs.

Ramsay, " he said, asserting 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 isolated and lonely. He knew that she was
trying to tease him for some reason; 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.

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 absorbed 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
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, during those same
years. Yet perhaps Carrie had not thought about
her, either. The thought was strange and distasteful.

" People soon drift apart, " said Mr. Bankes,

feeling, however, some satisfaction 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
preferred 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 interval 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 saying. 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, questions

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 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 uniformity. 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 woman 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 conversation? But,
she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and
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 opposite so that he may expose and relieve
the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent
desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty,
she reflected, 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 instrument 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 person 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 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 conversation 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 acquire 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?

That the fishing season was bad; that the men

were emigrating. They were talking about wages
and unemployment. The young man was abusing
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 lacking; 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 extremely 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 ability; 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 argument 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 looked at him thinking to find this
in his face; he would be looking magnificent...

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 unthinkable, 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
violent would explode, and then -- thank goodness!
she saw him clutch himself 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. Ramsay 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; perhaps
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 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
poetry, 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 lolloping 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, trying 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. 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, perhaps,
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 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 gallant; 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 B$oeuf 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, mor impressive, bearing in its bosom
the seeds of death; at the same time these lovers,
these people entering into illusion glittering 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 reverence, had returned;
and she knew it.

" It is a French recipe of my grandmother's, "

said Mrs. Ramsay, speaking 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 suspense
was over, and that now she was free both to triumph
and to mock, she laughed, she gesticulated, till Lily
thought, How childlike, how absurd 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 vibration, 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 included among the sailors and adventurers. But
what did he reply to her 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 perhaps. 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 unscrupulosity. 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 dilution. She would
move the tree rather more to the middle.

Such was the complexity of things. For what

happened to her, especially staying with the Ramsays,
was to be made to feel violently two opposite 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 inhumane than
this; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well
then, well then? she asked, somehow expecting the
others to go on with the argument, 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 described 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-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 influence of somebody upon something: he
could take care of himself. With Lily it was different.
She faded, under Minta's glow; became more
inconspicuous 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. Obviously, 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, solemnly rather, for it
arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there,

from husband and children and friends; all of which

rising in this profound stillness (she was helping
William Bankes to one very small piece 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 upwards, holding them
safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could
be said. There it was, all round them. It partook,
she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially
tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt
about something different once before that afternoon;
there is a coherence in things, a stability;
something, she meant, is immune from change,
and shines out (she glanced at the window with its
ripple of reflected 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 B$oeuf en Daube was a perfect
triumph.) Here, she felt, putting the spoon down,
was the still space that lies about the heart of things,
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 Madame 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 moment, 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. William 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. Ramsay 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
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 making, 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
failure. 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 saying,

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 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 other. 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 remembered, but he had forgotten the
name. Russian names were impossible, 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 stupid
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
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 happiness 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 awkwardness.
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
tonight, 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.
 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 sheaves,
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 feeling 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 vanishing 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.

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,
making 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
Tansley went off, while the others stood looking at
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 chatter,
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 unconsciously 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 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, accomplished;
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 upstairs, 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 Rayleys " -- she tried the new name
over; and she felt, with her hand on the nursery
door, that community of feeling with other people
which emotion 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, pursing 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 precaution was not needed. The children
were not asleep. It was most annoying. 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 Mildred, 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.

" 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 almost
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 beautiful 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,
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 manners certainly wanted
improving; yet she liked his laugh -- thinking this,
as she came downstairs, she noticed that she could
now see the moon itself 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 became 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 anything. " 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 marrying 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.

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 particular
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 tossing 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 stocking
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 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 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 fiddlesticks,
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, trying
to stifle his desire to complain to his wife that young
men did not admire 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 reasonable, clear and complete,
the essence sucked out of life and held rounded
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 being 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
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 landing; 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,
involuntarily, coming side by side, quite close, she
could feel his mind like 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 stocking. 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 finish 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
often 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.
<S II>

" 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. Carmichael, who liked to lie awake a
little reading Virgil, kept his candle burning rather
longer than the rest.

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, creeping 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. " Sometimes 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. Almost one might
imagine them, as they entered the drawing-room
questioning and wondering, toying with the flap of
hanging wall-paper, asking, would it hang much
longer, when would it fall? Then smoothly brushing
the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the
red and yellow 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 Lighthouse even,
the little airs mounted 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 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 window 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 midnight..

But what after all is one night? A short space,

especially when the darkness 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 labour, 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, divine 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, twitching 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 making the world reflect the compass of the soul.
The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in
his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless
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 before, his
arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]]

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, flourishing
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, iterating,
and reiterating their questions -- " Will you
fade? Will you perish? " -- scarcely disturbed the
peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as
if the question they asked scarcely needed that they
should answer: 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 them round
the house in silence. Once only a board sprang on
the landing; 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.
 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
leering sideways at her swinging figure a sound
issued from her lips -- something that had been gay
twenty years before on the stage perhaps, 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 getting 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 issued 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 warm in the
frost and had comfort in the desert. But Mrs.
McNab continued to drink and gossip as before.

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 beholders. Õ [Prue Pamsay, leaning on her
father's arm, was given in marriage. What, people
said, could have been more fitting? And, they added,
how beautiful she looked!]] å
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 vision within. In those mirrors, the
minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in
which clouds for ever turn and shadows form,

dreams persisted, 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, happiness 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.

Õ [Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness

connected with childbirth, which was indeed a
tragedy, people said, everything, they said, had
promised so well.]] å
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 itself with such authority

upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,

came now in the softer light of spring mixed with
moonlight gliding 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.

Õ [A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men

were blown up in France, among them Andrew
Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]] å
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 affirmed 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, 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 quiescence
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.

Õ [Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems

that spring, which had an unexpected success. The
war, people said, had revived their interest in
poetry.]] å

Night after night, summer and winter, the torment

of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine
weather, held their court without interference. Listening
(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 another, 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 confusion
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 before them, looking up, yet
beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.

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 children
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 expected 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.

" 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 families 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
basket 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.

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 larder. The
swallows nested in the drawing-roon; the floor was
strewn with straw; the plaster fell in shovelfuls;
rafters were laid bare; rats carried off this and that
to gnaw behind the wainscots. Tortoise-shell butterflies
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
carnation 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 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 cupboard; 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, upstairs now, now down
in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!

They drank their tea in the bedroom sometimes,

or in the study; breaking 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 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 noticed 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
sometimes, 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 intermittent music
which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark, a
bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related;
the hum of an insect, the tremor 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.]

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 argument, 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 themselves 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.
<S III>

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 Lighthouse? "
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?

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 relations 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, anyhow.
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.

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 demand
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 opposite.
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. Carmichael, but
close enough for his protection. Yes, it must have

been precisely 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.
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 terrace -- 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 disengaged 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 Ruthless -- 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 reminded 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
spirits subdued. James was sixteen, Cam, seventeen,
perhaps. She had looked round for some one who
was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. 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 under. 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 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 children 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, giving, 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 dependable 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, distraught. 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.

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 approach 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 remained 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, girding 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 hunger for sympathy, this demand
that she should surrender herself up to him entirely,
and even so he had sorrows enough to keep
her supplied 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 indecent. 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 figure 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 discredit, 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 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 annihiliation.

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 callousness (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. Ramsay 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 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 enterprise, 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 bethought 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
recalled (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 then,
she recalled, there was that sudden revivification,
that sudden flare (when she praised his boots),
that sudden recovery of vitality and interest
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.

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 uncompromising
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 presence, and her easel, rammed into
the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle. And
now that she had put 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 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 apperarances 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
content 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 with 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 repeats
words without being aware any longer who
originally spoke them.

Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously,

anxiously considering 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

saw, so that while her hand quivered with life, this

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 remember
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
possibly 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, stepping 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 depend somehow upon Mrs.
Ramsay sitting under the rock, with a pad on 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 sitting 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 unexpectedly 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 shaking) 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 painting.
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 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
hesitation the sails filled and, shrouded in profound
silence, she watched the boat take its way with
deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

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 horribly 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 muttering
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.

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 uncurled 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 probably --
and old Macalister would answer it, and they would
puff their pipes together, and Macalister would take
a tarry rope in his fingers, tying 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
Macalister 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 vigilance 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.

He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and

Cam thought, feeling 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 conpact; 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 receding 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 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 exhaustion 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 accurate, 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 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 maliciously 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 remembered. 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; 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. Ramsay 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 kicking 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.

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 flatten

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 colour melting into another like the
colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath 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 dislodge 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.

" 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 relationships.
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
silence 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 illumined 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 and
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 anything 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 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, abusing 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 making 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 tunnelling 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 remembered
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 followed

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, straightforward,
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 gratefully, almost admiringly), who went to
meetings and shared Paul's views (they had got
more and more pronounced) about the taxation of
land values and a capital levy. Far from breaking
up the marriage, that alliance 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 herself 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 William -- 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 marriage? 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 distant 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 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 remembered,
had listened to her with his wise child's
eyes when she explained 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 contrary. Thanks to his scientific
mind he understood -- a proof of disinterested intelligence

which had pleased her and comforted her

enormously. One could talk of painting then seriously
to a man. Indeed, his friendship 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, summer 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 so much time in laboratories 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 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 astonishingly 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 unrecognisable 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, a
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 existence. 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 nothing 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 sensations that went with

the bare look of the steps had become suddenly 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 inside, 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? Something 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 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.

Õ [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.]] å
 " Mrs. Ramsay! " Lily cried, " Mrs. Ramsay! "
But nothing happened. The pain increased. That
anguish could reduce one to such a pitch of imbecility,
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 attacked 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 going 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. 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 paper
parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle
of the bay.

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 become
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 intention 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 demand, or something quite unreasonable like
that. And if he does, James thought, then I shall
take a knife and strike him to the heart.

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 reasonably. 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 concrete shape.
Suppose then that as a child sitting helpless in a
perambulator , 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 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. Something, he remembered, stayed
and darkened over him; would not move; something
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 opening 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
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,

impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping a
pair of scissors.

Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled

and gurgled in the bottom 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, perhaps; 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 Lighthouse, 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.

[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.]

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 behind 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 compass, 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 adventure (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
universe -- 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.
Carmichael 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 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 gentleman 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# crackling 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
egotistical. 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 knowing 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 dinner; 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 written 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
absorbed 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, 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 important
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.
 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
distance; 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
unreal. So coming back from a journey, or after an
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 going 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 movement 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 286
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 purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common
feeling held the whole.

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 displeasing 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 desperately, 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 thinking -- 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 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 examining 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 happening 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 poetry 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 reading 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 poetry.
She thought that she knew how it went though,
slowly and sonorously. 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 impersonal;

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. 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
notion was in both of them about the ineffectiveness
of action, the supremacy 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 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 fellowship. 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 bleieved 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, pumping 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. Ramsay 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
flagellating 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 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 children cried,
" How's that? How's that? " cricketing? She would
stop knitting 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 profound 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 island, 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. It had been an earwig, apparently.
Other people might find centipedes. They had
laughed and laughed.

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 concealed
something. She brooded and sat silent. After
a time he would hang stealthily about the places
where she was -- roaming under the window 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 generally 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 wolfhound (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 relationship 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. Especially, Lily thought,
Mrs. Ramsay would glance at Prue. She sat in the
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 superficially 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 expected 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 determination
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 ordinary

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 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.

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. 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 details has power to assert itself,
so, she felt, looking drowsily at the island, all those
paths and terraces and bedrooms were fading and
disappearing, 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
valley, 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.
 They would soon be out of it, Mr. Ramsay was
saying to old Macalister; 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 attentively; 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 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
intently, 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 anything. He sat and looked at the island
and he might be thinking, We perished, 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.

" 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 mankind; 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.