Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (best novels to read for students .TXT) đź“–
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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too tired?”
At that Evan looked at them, or, since Jacob was staring ahead of him,
at his wife, surlily, sullenly, yet with a kind of distress—not that
she would pity him. Nor would the implacable spirit of love, for
anything he could do, cease its tortures.
They left him and he sat in the smoking-room, which looks out on to the
Square of the Constitution.
“Evan is happier alone,” said Sandra. “We have been separated from the
newspapers. Well, it is better that people should have what they
want…. You have seen all these wonderful things since we met…. What
impression … I think that you are changed.”
“You want to go to the Acropolis,” said Jacob. “Up here then.”
“One will remember it all one’s life,” said Sandra.
“Yes,” said Jacob. “I wish you could have come in the day-time.”
“This is more wonderful,” said Sandra, waving her hand.
Jacob looked vaguely.
“But you should see the Parthenon in the day-time,” he said. “You
couldn’t come to-morrow—it would be too early?”
“You have sat there for hours and hours by yourself?”
“There were some awful women this morning,” said Jacob.
“Awful women?” Sandra echoed.
“Frenchwomen.”
“But something very wonderful has happened,” said Sandra. Ten minutes,
fifteen minutes, half an hour—that was all the time before her.
“Yes,” he said.
“When one is your age—when one is young. What will you do? You will
fall in love—oh yes! But don’t be in too great a hurry. I am so much
older.”
She was brushed off the pavement by parading men.
“Shall we go on?” Jacob asked.
“Let us go on,” she insisted.
For she could not stop until she had told him—or heard him say—or was
it some action on his part that she required? Far away on the horizon
she discerned it and could not rest.
“You’d never get English people to sit out like this,” he said.
“Never—no. When you get back to England you won’t forget this—or come
with us to Constantinople!” she cried suddenly.
“But then…”
Sandra sighed.
“You must go to Delphi, of course,” she said. “But,” she asked herself,
“what do I want from him? Perhaps it is something that I have
missed….”
“You will get there about six in the evening,” she said. “You will see
the eagles.”
Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner
and yet composed. He was suffering, perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there
was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme
disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life.
Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need
not come to him—this disillusionment from women in middle life.
“The hotel is awful,” she said. “The last visitors had left their basins
full of dirty water. There is always that,” she laughed.
“The people one meets ARE beastly,” Jacob said.
His excitement was clear enough.
“Write and tell me about it,” she said. “And tell me what you feel and
what you think. Tell me everything.”
The night was dark. The Acropolis was a jagged mound.
“I should like to, awfully,” he said.
“When we get back to London, we shall meet…”
“Yes.”
“I suppose they leave the gates open?” he asked.
“We could climb them!” she answered wildly.
Obscuring the moon and altogether darkening the Acropolis the clouds
passed from east to west. The clouds solidified; the vapours thickened;
the trailing veils stayed and accumulated.
It was dark now over Athens, except for gauzy red streaks where the
streets ran; and the front of the Palace was cadaverous from electric
light. At sea the piers stood out, marked by separate dots; the waves
being invisible, and promontories and islands were dark humps with a few
lights.
“I’d love to bring my brother, if I may,” Jacob murmured.
“And then when your mother comes to London—,” said Sandra.
The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must
have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper
and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea
of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy.
In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the
sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it
pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing
stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle.
Sandra’s veils were swirled about her.
“I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?”
(The book was the poems of Donne.)
Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark.
Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—
Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be
distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in
some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled.
The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English
sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed
into it from the grass-rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew
in at Betty Flanders’s bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising
herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would
fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of
eternity.
But to return to Jacob and Sandra.
They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The
columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on
them year after year; and of that what remains?
As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that
when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep
for ever? Still, he went with them to Constantinople.
Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne’s poems
upon her dressing-table. And the book would be stood on the shelf in the
English country house where Sally Duggan’s Life of Father Damien in
verse would join it one of these days. There were ten or twelve little
volumes already. Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and
her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the
arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for
sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing
across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar. She
had had her moments. Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked
and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, “What for?
What for?”
“What for? What for?” Sandra would say, putting the book back, and
strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair. And Miss Edwards
would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast
mutton, by Sandra’s sudden solicitude: “Are you happy, Miss Edwards?”—a
thing Cissy Edwards hadn’t thought of for years.
“What for? What for?” Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to
judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the
depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters,
and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears. He was young—a man.
And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet. At
forty it might be a different matter. Already he had marked the things
he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough. However, you might place
beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.
But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens,
rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood
which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single
person, or inspection of features. All faces—Greek, Levantine, Turkish,
English—would have looked much the same in that darkness. At length the
columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and
St. Peter’s arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul’s looms up.
The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their
interpretation of the day’s meaning. Then, less melodiously, dissenters
of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation. The steamers,
resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact—how there
is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside. But nowadays it is the thin
voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that
collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn
sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—you can hear it from an open
window even in the heart of London.
But who, save the nerve-worn and sleepless, or thinkers standing with
hands to the eyes on some crag above the multitude, see things thus in
skeleton outline, bare of flesh? In Surbiton the skeleton is wrapped in
flesh.
“The kettle never boils so well on a sunny morning,” says Mrs. Grandage,
glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. Then the grey Persian cat
stretches itself on the window-seat, and buffets a moth with soft round
paws. And before breakfast is half over (they were late today), a baby
is deposited in her lap, and she must guard the sugar basin while Tom
Grandage reads the golfing article in the “Times,” sips his coffee,
wipes his moustaches, and is off to the office, where he is the greatest
authority upon the foreign exchanges and marked for promotion. The
skeleton is well wrapped in flesh. Even this dark night when the wind
rolls the darkness through Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford
Square it stirs (since it is summer-time and the height of the season),
plane trees spangled with electric light, and curtains still preserving
the room from the dawn. People still murmur over the last word said on
the staircase, or strain, all through their dreams, for the voice of the
alarum clock. So when the wind roams through a forest innumerable twigs
stir; hives are brushed; insects sway on grass blades; the spider runs
rapidly up a crease in the bark; and the whole air is tremulous with
breathing; elastic with filaments.
Only here—in Lombard Street and Fetter Lane and Bedford Square—each
insect carries a globe of the world in his head, and the webs of the
forest are schemes evolved for the smooth conduct of business; and honey
is treasure of one sort and another; and the stir in the air is the
indescribable agitation of life.
But colour returns; runs up the stalks of the grass; blows out into
tulips and crocuses; solidly stripes the tree trunks; and fills the
gauze of the air and the grasses and pools.
The Bank of England emerges; and the Monument with its bristling head of
golden hair; the dray horses crossing London Bridge show grey and
strawberry and iron-coloured. There is a whir of wings as the suburban
trains rush into the terminus. And the light mounts over the faces of
all the tall blind houses, slides through a chink and paints the
lustrous bellying crimson curtains; the green wine-glasses; the coffee-cups; and the chairs standing askew.
Sunlight strikes in upon shaving-glasses; and gleaming brass cans; upon
all the jolly trappings of the day; the bright, inquisitive, armoured,
resplendent, summer’s day, which has long since vanquished chaos; which
has dried the melancholy mediaeval mists; drained the swamp and stood
glass and stone upon it; and equipped our brains and bodies with such an
armoury of weapons
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