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Read books online » Poetry » Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📖

Book online «Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📖». Author Virginia Woolf



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needle-case; her brown wool

wound round an old postcard. There were the bulrushes and the Strand

magazines; and the linoleum sandy from the boys’ boots. A daddy-long-legs shot from corner to corner and hit the lamp globe. The wind blew

straight dashes of rain across the window, which flashed silver as they

passed through the light. A single leaf tapped hurriedly, persistently,

upon the glass. There was a hurricane out at sea.

 

Archer could not sleep.

 

Mrs. Flanders stooped over him. “Think of the fairies,” said Betty

Flanders. “Think of the lovely, lovely birds settling down on their

nests. Now shut your eyes and see the old mother bird with a worm in her

beak. Now turn and shut your eyes,” she murmured, “and shut your eyes.”

 

The lodging-house seemed full of gurgling and rushing; the cistern

overflowing; water bubbling and squeaking and running along the pipes

and streaming down the windows.

 

“What’s all that water rushing in?” murmured Archer.

 

“It’s only the bath water running away,” said Mrs. Flanders.

 

Something snapped out of doors.

 

“I say, won’t that steamer sink?” said Archer, opening his eyes.

 

“Of course it won’t,” said Mrs. Flanders. “The Captain’s in bed long

ago. Shut your eyes, and think of the fairies, fast asleep, under the

flowers.”

 

“I thought he’d never get off—such a hurricane,” she whispered to

Rebecca, who was bending over a spirit-lamp in the small room next door.

The wind rushed outside, but the small flame of the spirit-lamp burnt

quietly, shaded from the cot by a book stood on edge.

 

“Did he take his bottle well?” Mrs. Flanders whispered, and Rebecca

nodded and went to the cot and turned down the quilt, and Mrs. Flanders

bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning. The

window shook, and Rebecca stole like a cat and wedged it.

 

The two women murmured over the spirit-lamp, plotting the eternal

conspiracy of hush and clean bottles while the wind raged and gave a

sudden wrench at the cheap fastenings.

 

Both looked round at the cot. Their lips were pursed. Mrs. Flanders

crossed over to the cot.

 

“Asleep?” whispered Rebecca, looking at the cot.

 

Mrs. Flanders nodded.

 

“Good-night, Rebecca,” Mrs. Flanders murmured, and Rebecca called her

ma’m, though they were conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of

hush and clean bottles.

 

Mrs. Flanders had left the lamp burning in the front room. There were

her spectacles, her sewing; and a letter with the Scarborough postmark.

She had not drawn the curtains either.

 

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child’s

green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which

trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast,

hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its

own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights

seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in

bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over

the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that.

 

There was a click in the front sitting-room. Mr. Pearce had extinguished

the lamp. The garden went out. It was but a dark patch. Every inch was

rained upon. Every blade of grass was bent by rain. Eyelids would have

been fastened down by the rain. Lying on one’s back one would have seen

nothing but muddle and confusion—clouds turning and turning, and

something yellow-tinted and sulphurous in the darkness.

 

The little boys in the front bedroom had thrown off their blankets and

lay under the sheets. It was hot; rather sticky and steamy. Archer lay

spread out, with one arm striking across the pillow. He was flushed; and

when the heavy curtain blew out a little he turned and half-opened his

eyes. The wind actually stirred the cloth on the chest of drawers, and

let in a little light, so that the sharp edge of the chest of drawers

was visible, running straight up, until a white shape bulged out; and a

silver streak showed in the looking-glass.

 

In the other bed by the door Jacob lay asleep, fast asleep, profoundly

unconscious. The sheep’s jaw with the big yellow teeth in it lay at his

feet. He had kicked it against the iron bed-rail.

 

Outside the rain poured down more directly and powerfully as the wind

fell in the early hours of the morning. The aster was beaten to the

earth. The child’s bucket was half-full of rainwater; and the opal-shelled crab slowly circled round the bottom, trying with its weakly

legs to climb the steep side; trying again and falling back, and trying

again and again.

CHAPTER TWO

“MRS. FLANDERS”—“Poor Betty Flanders”—“Dear Betty”—“She’s very

attractive still”—“Odd she don’t marry again!” “There’s Captain Barfoot

to be sure—calls every Wednesday as regular as clockwork, and never

brings his wife.”

 

“But that’s Ellen Barfoot’s fault,” the ladies of Scarborough said. “She

don’t put herself out for no one.”

 

“A man likes to have a son—that we know.”

 

“Some tumours have to be cut; but the sort my mother had you bear with

for years and years, and never even have a cup of tea brought up to you

in bed.”

 

(Mrs. Barfoot was an invalid.)

 

Elizabeth Flanders, of whom this and much more than this had been said

and would be said, was, of course, a widow in her prime. She was half-way between forty and fifty. Years and sorrow between them; the death of

Seabrook, her husband; three boys; poverty; a house on the outskirts of

Scarborough; her brother, poor Morty’s, downfall and possible demise—

for where was he? what was he? Shading her eyes, she looked along the

road for Captain Barfoot—yes, there he was, punctual as ever; the

attentions of the Captain—all ripened Betty Flanders, enlarged her

figure, tinged her face with jollity, and flooded her eyes for no reason

that any one could see perhaps three times a day.

 

True, there’s no harm in crying for one’s husband, and the tombstone,

though plain, was a solid piece of work, and on summer’s days when the

widow brought her boys to stand there one felt kindly towards her. Hats

were raised higher than usual; wives tugged their husbands’ arms.

Seabrook lay six foot beneath, dead these many years; enclosed in three

shells; the crevices sealed with lead, so that, had earth and wood been

glass, doubtless his very face lay visible beneath, the face of a young

man whiskered, shapely, who had gone out duck-shooting and refused to

change his boots.

 

“Merchant of this city,” the tombstone said; though why Betty Flanders

had chosen so to call him when, as many still remembered, he had only

sat behind an office window for three months, and before that had broken

horses, ridden to hounds, farmed a few fields, and run a little wild—

well, she had to call him something. An example for the boys.

 

Had he, then, been nothing? An unanswerable question, since even if it

weren’t the habit of the undertaker to close the eyes, the light so soon

goes out of them. At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he

had merged in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand white

stones, some slanting, others upright, the decayed wreaths, the crosses

of green tin, the narrow yellow paths, and the lilacs that drooped in

April, with a scent like that of an invalid’s bedroom, over the

churchyard wall. Seabrook was now all that; and when, with her skirt

hitched up, feeding the chickens, she heard the bell for service or

funeral, that was Seabrook’s voice—the voice of the dead.

 

The rooster had been known to fly on her shoulder and peck her neck, so

that now she carried a stick or took one of the children with her when

she went to feed the fowls.

 

“Wouldn’t you like my knife, mother?” said Archer.

 

Sounding at the same moment as the bell, her son’s voice mixed life and

death inextricably, exhilaratingly.

 

“What a big knife for a small boy!” she said. She took it to please him.

Then the rooster flew out of the hen-house, and, shouting to Archer to

shut the door into the kitchen garden, Mrs. Flanders set her meal down,

clucked for the hens, went bustling about the orchard, and was seen from

over the way by Mrs. Cranch, who, beating her mat against the wall, held

it for a moment suspended while she observed to Mrs. Page next door that

Mrs. Flanders was in the orchard with the chickens.

 

Mrs. Page, Mrs. Cranch, and Mrs. Garfit could see Mrs. Flanders in the

orchard because the orchard was a piece of Dods Hill enclosed; and Dods

Hill dominated the village. No words can exaggerate the importance of

Dods Hill. It was the earth; the world against the sky; the horizon of

how many glances can best be computed by those who have lived all their

lives in the same village, only leaving it once to fight in the Crimea,

like old George Garfit, leaning over his garden gate smoking his pipe.

The progress of the sun was measured by it; the tint of the day laid

against it to be judged.

 

“Now she’s going up the hill with little John,” said Mrs. Cranch to Mrs.

Garfit, shaking her mat for the last time, and bustling indoors. Opening

the orchard gate, Mrs. Flanders walked to the top of Dods Hill, holding

John by the hand. Archer and Jacob ran in front or lagged behind; but

they were in the Roman fortress when she came there, and shouting out

what ships were to be seen in the bay. For there was a magnificent view

—moors behind, sea in front, and the whole of Scarborough from one end

to the other laid out flat like a puzzle. Mrs. Flanders, who was growing

stout, sat down in the fortress and looked about her.

 

The entire gamut of the view’s changes should have been known to her;

its winter aspect, spring, summer and autumn; how storms came up from

the sea; how the moors shuddered and brightened as the clouds went over;

she should have noted the red spot where the villas were building; and

the criss-cross of lines where the allotments were cut; and the diamond

flash of little glass houses in the sun. Or, if details like these

escaped her, she might have let her fancy play upon the gold tint of the

sea at sunset, and thought how it lapped in coins of gold upon the

shingle. Little pleasure boats shoved out into it; the black arm of the

pier hoarded it up. The whole city was pink and gold; domed; mist-wreathed; resonant; strident. Banjoes strummed; the parade smelt of tar

which stuck to the heels; goats suddenly cantered their carriages

through crowds. It was observed how well the Corporation had laid out

the flower-beds. Sometimes a straw hat was blown away. Tulips burnt in

the sun. Numbers of sponge-bag trousers were stretched in rows. Purple

bonnets fringed soft, pink, querulous faces on pillows in bath chairs.

Triangular hoardings were wheeled along by men in white coats. Captain

George Boase had caught a monster shark. One side of the triangular

hoarding said so in red, blue, and yellow letters; and each line ended

with three differently coloured notes of exclamation.

 

So that was a reason for going down into the Aquarium, where the sallow

blinds, the stale smell of spirits of salt, the bamboo chairs, the

tables with ash-trays, the revolving fish, the attendant knitting behind

six or seven chocolate boxes (often she was quite alone with the fish

for hours

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