Yes, Mr Bankes said, watching him go. It was a thousand pities. (Lily had
said something about his frightening her—he changed from one mood to
another so suddenly.) Yes, said Mr Bankes, it was a thousand pities that
Ramsay could not behave a little more like other people. (For he liked
Lily Briscoe; he could discuss Ramsay with her quite openly.) It was for
that reason, he said, that the young don't read Carlyle. A crusty old
grumbler who lost his temper if the porridge was cold, why should he
preach to us? was what Mr Bankes understood that young people said
nowadays. It was a thousand pities if you thought, as he did, that Carlyle
was one of the great teachers of mankind. Lily was ashamed to say that
she had not read Carlyle since she was at school. But in her opinion one
liked Mr Ramsay all the better for thinking that if his little finger ached
the whole world must come to an end. It was not THAT she minded. For
who could be deceived by him? He asked you quite openly to flatter
him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked
was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.
"A bit of a hypocrite?" Mr Bankes suggested, looking too at Mr.
Ramsay's back, for was he not thinking of his friendship, and of Cam refusing
to give him a flower, and of all those boys and girls, and his own
house, full of comfort, but, since his wife's death, quiet rather? Of course,
he had his work… All the same, he rather wished Lily to agree that Ramsay
was, as he said, "a bit of a hypocrite."
Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking
down. Looking up, there he was—Mr Ramsay—advancing towards
them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite? she repeated.
Oh, no—the most sincere of men, the truest (here he was), the
best; but, looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself, he is tyrannical,
he is unjust; and kept looking down, purposely, for only so
could she keep steady, staying with the Ramsays. Directly one looked up
and saw them, what she called "being in love" flooded them. They became
part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is
the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds
39
sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as
she saw Mr Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs Ramsay sitting
with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending,
how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one
lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one
up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
Mr Bankes expected her to answer. And she was about to say
something criticizing Mrs Ramsay, how she was alarming, too, in her
way, high-handed, or words to that effect, when Mr Bankes made it entirely
unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was considering
his age, turned sixty, and his cleanliness and his impersonality, and
the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze as
Lily saw him gazing at Mrs Ramsay was a rapture, equivalent, Lily felt,
to the loves of dozens of young men (and perhaps Mrs Ramsay had never
excited the loves of dozens of young men). It was love, she thought,
pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted
to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear
their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the
world and become part of the human gain. So it was indeed. The world
by all means should have shared it, could Mr Bankes have said why that
woman pleased him so; why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her
boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific
problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it, and felt, as he felt when
he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants,
that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued.
Such a rapture—for by what other name could one call it?—made Lily
Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of
importance; something about Mrs Ramsay. It paled beside this "rapture,"
this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude; for nothing so
solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised
its burdens, as this sublime power, this heavenly gift, and one would no
more disturb it, while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying
level across the floor.
