Read To The Lighthouse Page 1




  A Project Gutenberg of Australia Etext

  Title: To the Lighthouse

  Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

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  A Project Gutenberg of Australia Etext

  Title: To the Lighthouse

  Author: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

  THE WINDOW

  1

  "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs Ramsay. "But you'll

  have to be up with the lark," she added.

  To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were

  settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which

  he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's

  darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the

  age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling 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, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed

  a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would

  have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr Ramsay excited

  in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as

  a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with

  the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule 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 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