Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📖

swung open and a powerfully built young man

jumped in. He seemed not to hear her. The train did not stop before it

reached Cambridge, and here she was shut up alone, in a railway

carriage, with a young man.

 

She touched the spring of her dressing-case, and ascertained that the

scent-bottle and a novel from Mudie’s were both handy (the young man was

standing up with his back to her, putting his bag in the rack). She

would throw the scent-bottle with her right hand, she decided, and tug

the communication cord with her left. She was fifty years of age, and

had a son at college. Nevertheless, it is a fact that men are dangerous.

She read half a column of her newspaper; then stealthily looked over the

edge to decide the question of safety by the infallible test of

appearance…. She would like to offer him her paper. But do young men

read the Morning Post? She looked to see what he was reading—the Daily

Telegraph.

 

Taking note of socks (loose), of tie (shabby), she once more reached his

face. She dwelt upon his mouth. The lips were shut. The eyes bent down,

since he was reading. All was firm, yet youthful, indifferent,

unconscious—as for knocking one down! No, no, no! She looked out of the

window, smiling slightly now, and then came back again, for he didn’t

notice her. Grave, unconscious… now he looked up, past her… he

seemed so out of place, somehow, alone with an elderly lady… then he

fixed his eyes—which were blue—on the landscape. He had not realized

her presence, she thought. Yet it was none of HER fault that this was

not a smoking-carriage—if that was what he meant.

 

Nobody sees any one as he is, let alone an elderly lady sitting opposite

a strange young man in a railway carriage. They see a whole—they see

all sorts of things—they see themselves…. Mrs. Norman now read three

pages of one of Mr. Norris’s novels. Should she say to the young man

(and after all he was just the same age as her own boy): “If you want to

smoke, don’t mind me”? No: he seemed absolutely indifferent to her

presence… she did not wish to interrupt.

 

But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he

was in some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting,

distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one

can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It

is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly

what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the

train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put

the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: “Let

me” very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.

 

“Who…” said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd

on the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her

sentence. As this was Cambridge, as she was staying there for the week-end, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round

tables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in her

mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls

in the water and disappears for ever.

 

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked,

exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought, and no doubt if you

are of a mystical tendency, consolation, and even explanation, shower

down from the unbroken surface. But above Cambridge—anyhow above the

roof of King’s College Chapel—there is a difference. Out at sea a great

city will cast a brightness into the night. Is it fanciful to suppose

the sky, washed into the crevices of King’s College Chapel, lighter,

thinner, more sparkling than the sky elsewhere? Does Cambridge burn not

only into the night, but into the day?

 

Look, as they pass into service, how airily the gowns blow out, as

though nothing dense and corporeal were within. What sculptured faces,

what certainty, authority controlled by piety, although great boots

march under the gowns. In what orderly procession they advance. Thick

wax candles stand upright; young men rise in white gowns; while the

subservient eagle bears up for inspection the great white book.

 

An inclined plane of light comes accurately through each window, purple

and yellow even in its most diffused dust, while, where it breaks upon

stone, that stone is softly chalked red, yellow, and purple. Neither

snow nor greenery, winter nor summer, has power over the old stained

glass. As the sides of a lantern protect the flame so that it burns

steady even in the wildest night—burns steady and gravely illumines the

tree-trunks—so inside the Chapel all was orderly. Gravely sounded the

voices; wisely the organ replied, as if buttressing human faith with the

assent of the elements. The white-robed figures crossed from side to

side; now mounted steps, now descended, all very orderly.

 

… If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest

creeps up to it—a curious assembly, since though they scramble and

swing and knock their heads against the glass, they seem to have no

purpose—something senseless inspires them. One gets tired of watching

them, as they amble round the lantern and blindly tap as if for

admittance, one large toad being the most besotted of any and

shouldering his way through the rest. Ah, but what’s that? A terrifying

volley of pistol-shots rings out—cracks sharply; ripples spread—

silence laps smooth over sound. A tree—a tree has fallen, a sort of

death in the forest. After that, the wind in the trees sounds

melancholy.

 

But this service in King’s College Chapel—why allow women to take part

in it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily

vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if

the mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards upon

cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs.

Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense of

individuals—some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansies

and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church.

For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no

disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking,

lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the

blood run cold with horror (should you be one of a congregation—alone,

shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely.

So do these women—though separately devout, distinguished, and vouched

for by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands.

Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they’re as ugly as

sin.

 

Now there was a scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durrant’s eye;

looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.

 

“Waverley,” the villa on the road to Girton was called, not that Mr.

Plumer admired Scott or would have chosen any name at all, but names are

useful when you have to entertain undergraduates, and as they sat

waiting for the fourth undergraduate, on Sunday at lunch-time, there was

talk of names upon gates.

 

“How tiresome,” Mrs. Plumer interrupted impulsively. “Does anybody know

Mr. Flanders?”

 

Mr. Durrant knew him; and therefore blushed slightly, and said,

awkwardly, something about being sure—looking at Mr. Plumer and

hitching the right leg of his trouser as he spoke. Mr. Plumer got up and

stood in front of the fireplace. Mrs. Plumer laughed like a

straightforward friendly fellow. In short, anything more horrible than

the scene, the setting, the prospect, even the May garden being

afflicted with chill sterility and a cloud choosing that moment to cross

the sun, cannot be imagined. There was the garden, of course. Every one

at the same moment looked at it. Owing to the cloud, the leaves ruffled

grey, and the sparrows—there were two sparrows.

 

“I think,” said Mrs. Plumer, taking advantage of the momentary respite,

while the young men stared at the garden, to look at her husband, and

he, not accepting full responsibility for the act, nevertheless touched

the bell.

 

There can be no excuse for this outrage upon one hour of human life,

save the reflection which occurred to Mr. Plumer as he carved the

mutton, that if no don ever gave a luncheon party, if Sunday after

Sunday passed, if men went down, became lawyers, doctors, members of

Parliament, business men—if no don ever gave a luncheon party—

 

“Now, does lamb make the mint sauce, or mint sauce make the lamb?” he

asked the young man next him, to break a silence which had already

lasted five minutes and a half.

 

“I don’t know, sir,” said the young man, blushing very vividly.

 

At this moment in came Mr. Flanders. He had mistaken the time.

 

Now, though they had finished their meat, Mrs. Plumer took a second

helping of cabbage. Jacob determined, of course, that he would eat his

meat in the time it took her to finish her cabbage, looking once or

twice to measure his speed—only he was infernally hungry. Seeing this,

Mrs. Plumer said that she was sure Mr. Flanders would not mind—and the

tart was brought in. Nodding in a peculiar way, she directed the maid to

give Mr. Flanders a second helping of mutton. She glanced at the mutton.

Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.

 

It was none of her fault—since how could she control her father

begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester? and once

begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious,

with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an

ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of

the ladder? What was at the top of the ladder? A sense that all the

rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer

became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs. Plumer could

only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the

ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the

ladder.

 

“I was down at the races yesterday,” she said, “with my two little

girls.”

 

It was none of THEIR fault either. In they came to the drawing-room, in

white frocks and blue sashes. They handed the cigarettes. Rhoda had

inherited her father’s cold grey eyes. Cold grey eyes George Plumer had,

but in them was an abstract light. He could talk about Persia and the

Trade winds, the Reform Bill and the cycle of the harvests. Books were

on his shelves by Wells and Shaw; on the table serious sixpenny

weeklies written by pale men in muddy boots—the weekly creak and

screech of brains rinsed in cold water and wrung dry—melancholy papers.

 

“I don’t feel that I know the truth about anything till I’ve read them

both!” said Mrs. Plumer brightly, tapping the table of contents with her

bare red hand, upon which the ring looked so incongruous.

 

“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” exclaimed Jacob, as the four undergraduates

left the house. “Oh, my God!”

 

“Bloody beastly!” he said, scanning the street for lilac or bicycle—

anything to restore his sense of freedom.

 

“Bloody beastly,” he said to Timmy Durrant, summing up his discomfort at

the world shown him at lunch-time, a world capable of existing—there

was no doubt about that—but so unnecessary, such a thing to believe in—

Shaw and Wells and the serious sixpenny weeklies! What were they after,

scrubbing and demolishing, these elderly people? Had they