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

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Homer, Shakespeare, the Elizabethans? He saw it clearly outlined against

the feelings he drew from youth and natural inclination. The poor devils

had rigged up this meagre object. Yet something of pity was in him.

Those wretched little girls—

 

The extent to which he was disturbed proves that he was already agog.

Insolent he was and inexperienced, but sure enough the cities which the

elderly of the race have built upon the skyline showed like brick

suburbs, barracks, and places of discipline against a red and yellow

flame. He was impressionable; but the word is contradicted by the

composure with which he hollowed his hand to screen a match. He was a

young man of substance.

 

Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as

a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in

such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and

Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth

in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so

intolerably disagreeable—“I am what I am, and intend to be it,” for

which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for

himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from making it. Wells and

Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies will sit on its head. Every time

he lunches out on Sunday—at dinner parties and tea parties—there will

be this same shock—horror—discomfort—then pleasure, for he draws into

him at every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such

reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft in

the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy

air of May, the elastic air with its particles—chestnut bloom, pollen,

whatever it is that gives the May air its potency, blurring the trees,

gumming the buds, daubing the green. And the river too runs past, not at

flood, nor swiftly, but cloying the oar that dips in it and drops white

drops from the blade, swimming green and deep over the bowed rushes, as

if lavishly caressing them.

 

Where they moored their boat the trees showered down, so that their

topmost leaves trailed in the ripples and the green wedge that lay in

the water being made of leaves shifted in leaf-breadths as the real

leaves shifted. Now there was a shiver of wind—instantly an edge of

sky; and as Durrant ate cherries he dropped the stunted yellow cherries

through the green wedge of leaves, their stalks twinkling as they

wriggled in and out, and sometimes one half-bitten cherry would go down

red into the green. The meadow was on a level with Jacob’s eyes as he

lay back; gilt with buttercups, but the grass did not run like the thin

green water of the graveyard grass about to overflow the tombstones, but

stood juicy and thick. Looking up, backwards, he saw the legs of

children deep in the grass, and the legs of cows. Munch, munch, he

heard; then a short step through the grass; then again munch, munch,

munch, as they tore the grass short at the roots. In front of him two

white butterflies circled higher and higher round the elm tree.

 

“Jacob’s off,” thought Durrant looking up from his novel. He kept

reading a few pages and then looking up in a curiously methodical

manner, and each time he looked up he took a few cherries out of the bag

and ate them abstractedly. Other boats passed them, crossing the

backwater from side to side to avoid each other, for many were now

moored, and there were now white dresses and a flaw in the column of air

between two trees, round which curled a thread of blue—Lady Miller’s

picnic party. Still more boats kept coming, and Durrant, without getting

up, shoved their boat closer to the bank.

 

“Oh-h-h-h,” groaned Jacob, as the boat rocked, and the trees rocked, and

the white dresses and the white flannel trousers drew out long and

wavering up the bank.

 

“Oh-h-h-h!” He sat up, and felt as if a piece of elastic had snapped in

his face.

 

“They’re friends of my mother’s,” said Durrant. “So old Bow took no end

of trouble about the boat.”

 

And this boat had gone from Falmouth to St. Ives Bay, all round the

coast. A larger boat, a ten-ton yacht, about the twentieth of June,

properly fitted out, Durrant said…

 

“There’s the cash difficulty,” said Jacob.

 

“My people’ll see to that,” said Durrant (the son of a banker,

deceased).

 

“I intend to preserve my economic independence,” said Jacob stiffly. (He

was getting excited.)

 

“My mother said something about going to Harrogate,” he said with a

little annoyance, feeling the pocket where he kept his letters.

 

“Was that true about your uncle becoming a Mohammedan?” asked Timmy

Durrant.

 

Jacob had told the story of his Uncle Morty in Durrant’s room the night

before.

 

“I expect he’s feeding the sharks, if the truth were known,” said Jacob.

“I say, Durrant, there’s none left!” he exclaimed, crumpling the bag

which had held the cherries, and throwing it into the river. He saw Lady

Miller’s picnic party on the island as he threw the bag into the river.

 

A sort of awkwardness, grumpiness, gloom came into his eyes.

 

“Shall we move on… this beastly crowd…” he said.

 

So up they went, past the island.

 

The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the

chestnut blossoms were white in the green; dim was the cow-parsley in

the meadows.

 

The waiters at Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards,

from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob’s rooms,

however, were in Neville’s Court; at the top; so that reaching his door

one went in a little out of breath; but he wasn’t there. Dining in Hall,

presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville’s Court long before

midnight, only the pillars opposite will always be white, and the

fountains. A curious effect the gate has, like lace upon pale green.

Even in the window you hear the plates; a hum of talk, too, from the

diners; the Hall lit up, and the swing-doors opening and shutting with a

soft thud. Some are late.

 

Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs. There were yellow

flags in a jar on the mantelpiece; a photograph of his mother; cards

from societies with little raised crescents, coats of arms, and

initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay paper ruled with a red

margin—an essay, no doubt—“Does History consist of the Biographies of

Great Men?” There were books enough; very few French books; but then any

one who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes

him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of Wellington, for

example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens; the Faery Queen; a Greek

dictionary with the petals of poppies pressed to silk between the pages;

all the Elizabethans. His slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats

burnt to the water’s rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks,

and a mezzotint from Sir Joshua—all very English. The works of Jane

Austen, too, in deference, perhaps, to some one else’s standard. Carlyle

was a prize. There were books upon the Italian painters of the

Renaissance, a Manual of the Diseases of the Horse, and all the usual

text-books. Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the

curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm-chair

creaks, though no one sits there.

 

Coming down the steps a little sideways [Jacob sat on the window-seat

talking to Durrant; he smoked, and Durrant looked at the map], the old

man, with his hands locked behind him, his gown floating black, lurched,

unsteadily, near the wall; then, upstairs he went into his room. Then

another, who raised his hand and praised the columns, the gate, the sky;

another, tripping and smug. Each went up a staircase; three lights were

lit in the dark windows.

 

If any light burns above Cambridge, it must be from three such rooms;

Greek burns here; science there; philosophy on the ground floor. Poor

old Huxtable can’t walk straight;—Sopwith, too, has praised the sky any

night these twenty years; and Cowan still chuckles at the same stories.

It is not simple, or pure, or wholly splendid, the lamp of learning,

since if you see them there under its light (whether Rossetti’s on the

wall, or Van Gogh reproduced, whether there are lilacs in the bowl or

rusty pipes), how priestly they look! How like a suburb where you go to

see a view and eat a special cake! “We are the sole purveyors of this

cake.” Back you go to London; for the treat is over.

 

Old Professor Huxtable, performing with the method of a clock his change

of dress, let himself down into his chair; filled his pipe; chose his

paper; crossed his feet; and extracted his glasses. The whole flesh of

his face then fell into folds as if props were removed. Yet strip a

whole seat of an underground railway carriage of its heads and old

Huxtable’s head will hold them all. Now, as his eye goes down the print,

what a procession tramps through the corridors of his brain, orderly,

quick-stepping, and reinforced, as the march goes on, by fresh runnels,

till the whole hall, dome, whatever one calls it, is populous with

ideas. Such a muster takes place in no other brain. Yet sometimes there

he’ll sit for hours together, gripping the arm of the chair, like a man

holding fast because stranded, and then, just because his corn twinges,

or it may be the gout, what execrations, and, dear me, to hear him talk

of money, taking out his leather purse and grudging even the smallest

silver coin, secretive and suspicious as an old peasant woman with all

her lies. Strange paralysis and constriction—marvellous illumination.

Serene over it all rides the great full brow, and sometimes asleep or in

the quiet spaces of the night you might fancy that on a pillow of stone

he lay triumphant.

 

Sopwith, meanwhile, advancing with a curious trip from the fireplace,

cut the chocolate cake into segments. Until midnight or later there

would be undergraduates in his room, sometimes as many as twelve,

sometimes three or four; but nobody got up when they went or when they

came; Sopwith went on talking. Talking, talking, talking—as if

everything could be talked—the soul itself slipped through the lips in

thin silver disks which dissolve in young men’s minds like silver, like

moonlight. Oh, far away they’d remember it, and deep in dulness gaze

back on it, and come to refresh themselves again.

 

“Well, I never. That’s old Chucky. My dear boy, how’s the world treating

you?” And in came poor little Chucky, the unsuccessful provincial,

Stenhouse his real name, but of course Sopwith brought back by using the

other everything, everything, “all I could never be”—yes, though next

day, buying his newspaper and catching the early train, it all seemed to

him childish, absurd; the chocolate cake, the young men; Sopwith summing

things up; no, not all; he would send his son there. He would save every

penny to send his son there.

 

Sopwith went on talking; twining stiff fibres of awkward speech—things

young men blurted out—plaiting them round his own smooth garland,

making the bright side show, the vivid greens, the sharp thorns,

manliness. He loved it. Indeed to Sopwith a man could say anything,

until perhaps he’d grown old, or gone under, gone deep, when the silver

disks would tinkle hollow, and the inscription read a little too simple,

and the old stamp look too pure, and