No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out— a
refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress— children
never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and
what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she
need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that
was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to
think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive,
glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity,
to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible
to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus
that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for
the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range
of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this
sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily,
Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know
us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is
unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is
what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all
the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing
aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness
could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she
thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most
welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability.
Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished
here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of
darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and
there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when
things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing
there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long
steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching
them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself
to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long
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steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking,
sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the
thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would lift up on it
some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like
that—"Children don't forget, children don't forget"—which she would
repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will
come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the
Lord.
But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had
said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not
mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it
seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she
alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence
that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without
vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that
light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate
things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became
one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness
thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There
rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there
curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one's being, a
mist, a bride to meet her lover.
What brought her to say that: "We are in the hands of the Lord?" she
wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, annoyed
her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have
made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the
fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor.
There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that.
No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure,
slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and
composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband
passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the
philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog, he could not
help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It
saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed,
that he could not protect her, and, when he reached the hedge, he was
sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her.
Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was irritable—
he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He
looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.
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Always, Mrs Ramsay felt, one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly
by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight.
She listened, but it was all very still; cricket was over; the children were
in their baths; there was only the sound of the sea. She stopped knitting;
she held the long reddish-brown stocking dangling in her hands a moment.
She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for
when one woke at all, one's relations changed, she looked at the steady
light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little
her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it
bent across their bed, stroking the floor), but for all that she thought,
watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its
silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would
flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness,
intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,
as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves
of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and
the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the
floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!
He turned and saw her. Ah! She was lovely, lovelier now than ever he
thought. But he could not speak to her. He could not interrupt her. He
wanted urgently to speak to her now that James was gone and she was
alone at last. But he resolved, no; he would not interrupt her. She was
aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be,
and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should
look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help
her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at
that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he
would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the
picture frame, and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her.
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