Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf (best novels to read for students .TXT) đź“–
- Author: Virginia Woolf
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Greek boy’s head. But he would respect still. A woman, divining the
priest, would, involuntarily, despise.
Cowan, Erasmus Cowan, sipped his port alone, or with one rosy little
man, whose memory held precisely the same span of time; sipped his port,
and told his stories, and without book before him intoned Latin, Virgil
and Catullus, as if language were wine upon his lips. Only—sometimes it
will come over one—what if the poet strode in? “THIS my image?” he
might ask, pointing to the chubby man, whose brain is, after all,
Virgil’s representative among us, though the body gluttonize, and as for
arms, bees, or even the plough, Cowan takes his trips abroad with a
French novel in his pocket, a rug about his knees, and is thankful to be
home again in his place, in his line, holding up in his snug little
mirror the image of Virgil, all rayed round with good stories of the
dons of Trinity and red beams of port. But language is wine upon his
lips. Nowhere else would Virgil hear the like. And though, as she goes
sauntering along the Backs, old Miss Umphelby sings him melodiously
enough, accurately too, she is always brought up by this question as she
reaches Clare Bridge: “But if I met him, what should I wear?”—and then,
taking her way up the avenue towards Newnham, she lets her fancy play
upon other details of men’s meeting with women which have never got into
print. Her lectures, therefore, are not half so well attended as those
of Cowan, and the thing she might have said in elucidation of the text
for ever left out. In short, face a teacher with the image of the taught
and the mirror breaks. But Cowan sipped his port, his exaltation over,
no longer the representative of Virgil. No, the builder, assessor,
surveyor, rather; ruling lines between names, hanging lists above doors.
Such is the fabric through which the light must shine, if shine it can—
the light of all these languages, Chinese and Russian, Persian and
Arabic, of symbols and figures, of history, of things that are known and
things that are about to be known. So that if at night, far out at sea
over the tumbling waves, one saw a haze on the waters, a city
illuminated, a whiteness even in the sky, such as that now over the Hall
of Trinity where they’re still dining, or washing up plates, that would
be the light burning there—the light of Cambridge.
“Let’s go round to Simeon’s room,” said Jacob, and they rolled up the
map, having got the whole thing settled.
All the lights were coming out round the court, and falling on the
cobbles, picking out dark patches of grass and single daisies. The young
men were now back in their rooms. Heaven knows what they were doing.
What was it that could DROP like that? And leaning down over a foaming
window-box, one stopped another hurrying past, and upstairs they went
and down they went, until a sort of fulness settled on the court, the
hive full of bees, the bees home thick with gold, drowsy, humming,
suddenly vocal; the Moonlight Sonata answered by a waltz.
The Moonlight Sonata tinkled away; the waltz crashed. Although young men
still went in and out, they walked as if keeping engagements. Now and
then there was a thud, as if some heavy piece of furniture had fallen,
unexpectedly, of its own accord, not in the general stir of life after
dinner. One supposed that young men raised their eyes from their books
as the furniture fell. Were they reading? Certainly there was a sense of
concentration in the air. Behind the grey walls sat so many young men,
some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs,
perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and
writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen moved—
simple young men, these, who would—but there is no need to think of
them grown old; others eating sweets; here they boxed; and, well, Mr.
Hawkins must have been mad suddenly to throw up his window and bawl:
“Jo—seph! Jo—seph!” and then he ran as hard as ever he could across
the court, while an elderly man, in a green apron, carrying an immense
pile of tin covers, hesitated, balanced, and then went on. But this was
a diversion. There were young men who read, lying in shallow arm-chairs,
holding their books as if they had hold in their hands of something that
would see them through; they being all in a torment, coming from midland
towns, clergymen’s sons. Others read Keats. And those long histories in
many volumes—surely some one was now beginning at the beginning in
order to understand the Holy Roman Empire, as one must. That was part of
the concentration, though it would be dangerous on a hot spring night—
dangerous, perhaps, to concentrate too much upon single books, actual
chapters, when at any moment the door opened and Jacob appeared; or
Richard Bonamy, reading Keats no longer, began making long pink spills
from an old newspaper, bending forward, and looking eager and contented
no more, but almost fierce. Why? Only perhaps that Keats died young—one
wants to write poetry too and to love—oh, the brutes! It’s damnably
difficult. But, after all, not so difficult if on the next staircase, in
the large room, there are two, three, five young men all convinced of
this—of brutality, that is, and the clear division between right and
wrong. There was a sofa, chairs, a square table, and the window being
open, one could see how they sat—legs issuing here, one there crumpled
in a corner of the sofa; and, presumably, for you could not see him,
somebody stood by the fender, talking. Anyhow, Jacob, who sat astride a
chair and ate dates from a long box, burst out laughing. The answer came
from the sofa corner; for his pipe was held in the air, then replaced.
Jacob wheeled round. He had something to say to THAT, though the sturdy
red-haired boy at the table seemed to deny it, wagging his head slowly
from side to side; and then, taking out his penknife, he dug the point
of it again and again into a knot in the table, as if affirming that the
voice from the fender spoke the truth—which Jacob could not deny.
Possibly, when he had done arranging the date-stones, he might find
something to say to it—indeed his lips opened—only then there broke
out a roar of laughter.
The laughter died in the air. The sound of it could scarcely have
reached any one standing by the Chapel, which stretched along the
opposite side of the court. The laughter died out, and only gestures of
arms, movements of bodies, could be seen shaping something in the room.
Was it an argument? A bet on the boat races? Was it nothing of the sort?
What was shaped by the arms and bodies moving in the twilight room?
A step or two beyond the window there was nothing at all, except the
enclosing buildings—chimneys upright, roofs horizontal; too much brick
and building for a May night, perhaps. And then before one’s eyes would
come the bare hills of Turkey—sharp lines, dry earth, coloured flowers,
and colour on the shoulders of the women, standing naked-legged in the
stream to beat linen on the stones. The stream made loops of water round
their ankles. But none of that could show clearly through the swaddlings
and blanketings of the Cambridge night. The stroke of the clock even was
muffled; as if intoned by somebody reverent from a pulpit; as if
generations of learned men heard the last hour go rolling through their
ranks and issued it, already smooth and time-worn, with their blessing,
for the use of the living.
Was it to receive this gift from the past that the young man came to the
window and stood there, looking out across the court? It was Jacob. He
stood smoking his pipe while the last stroke of the clock purred softly
round him. Perhaps there had been an argument. He looked satisfied;
indeed masterly; which expression changed slightly as he stood there,
the sound of the clock conveying to him (it may be) a sense of old
buildings and time; and himself the inheritor; and then to-morrow; and
friends; at the thought of whom, in sheer confidence and pleasure, it
seemed, he yawned and stretched himself.
Meanwhile behind him the shape they had made, whether by argument or
not, the spiritual shape, hard yet ephemeral, as of glass compared with
the dark stone of the Chapel, was dashed to splinters, young men rising
from chairs and sofa corners, buzzing and barging about the room, one
driving another against the bedroom door, which giving way, in they
fell. Then Jacob was left there, in the shallow arm-chair, alone with
Masham? Anderson? Simeon? Oh, it was Simeon. The others had all gone.
“… Julian the Apostate….” Which of them said that and the other
words murmured round it? But about midnight there sometimes rises, like
a veiled figure suddenly woken, a heavy wind; and this now flapping
through Trinity lifted unseen leaves and blurred everything. “Julian the
Apostate”—and then the wind. Up go the elm branches, out blow the
sails, the old schooners rear and plunge, the grey waves in the hot
Indian Ocean tumble sultrily, and then all falls flat again.
So, if the veiled lady stepped through the Courts of Trinity, she now
drowsed once more, all her draperies about her, her head against a
pillar.
“Somehow it seems to matter.”
The low voice was Simeon’s.
The voice was even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on
the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said “hum,”
or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the
intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind
indelibly.
“Well, you seem to have studied the subject,” said Jacob, rising and
standing over Simeon’s chair. He balanced himself; he swayed a little.
He appeared extraordinarily happy, as if his pleasure would brim and
spill down the sides if Simeon spoke.
Simeon said nothing. Jacob remained standing. But intimacy—the room was
full of it, still, deep, like a pool. Without need of movement or speech
it rose softly and washed over everything, mollifying, kindling, and
coating the mind with the lustre of pearl, so that if you talk of a
light, of Cambridge burning, it’s not languages only. It’s Julian the
Apostate.
But Jacob moved. He murmured good-night. He went out into the court. He
buttoned his jacket across his chest. He went back to his rooms, and
being the only man who walked at that moment back to his rooms, his
footsteps rang out, his figure loomed large. Back from the Chapel, back
from the Hall, back from the Library, came the sound of his footsteps,
as if the old stone echoed with magisterial authority: “The young man—
the young man—the young man-back to his rooms.”
What’s the use of trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those
little thin paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together
with sea-water? Although the plays of Shakespeare had frequently been
praised, even quoted, and placed higher than the Greek, never since they
started had Jacob managed to read one through. Yet what an opportunity!
For the Scilly Isles had been sighted by Timmy Durrant lying like
mountain-tops almost a-wash in precisely the right place. His
calculations had worked perfectly, and really the sight of him sitting
there, with his hand on the tiller, rosy gilled, with a sprout of beard,
looking sternly at the stars, then at a
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